Human-Pig Chimeras as a Solution to Human Cloning
Have you ever thought of human cloning as a solution to such issues as terminal illnesses and the deficiency in organ donation? If yes, then stop thinking about it because human cloning will not save the problem of deaths
but will only help cure one person by killing the other one. The problem of human cloning is a serious controversial issue in the United States. The modern science is so advanced that the scientists are able to clone animals successfully; moreover, they assert that it is possible to clone humans. However, human cloning is not legalized in the United States. Thus, many researchers, genetic engineers, and other scientists argue whether human cloning should be authorized or not. Human cloning should not be legalized because of many moral and social issues that might occur; instead, human-pig chimeras could be created to cultivate human organs and save people’s lives because such alternatives to cloning as the development of organ donation and cloning of human cells are inadequate solutions due to several disadvantages.
With the increasing number of sick people who are in need of organ transplants, the problem of human cloning becomes more and more urgent today. Since those times when the first animal was successfully cloned,
scientists have been trying to find a possibility to clone a human being. Interestingly, the history of animal cloning began in 1952, when Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King “made the first animal cloning by using nuclear
transfer of embryonic cells of frogs” (Mandrich, 2013, p. 1). Today, cloning is an easy process, and “thousands genes have been cloned” in different laboratories of the world (Mandrich, 2013, p. 3). Moreover, many scientists claim that it is possible to clone a human being; the only limitation is the fact that it is not legalized.
Since animal cloning is possible and authorized in the USA and human cloning is not allowed, some scientists argue that the government should legalize human cloning to save the lives of many terminal patients. In his
work Moral and Legal Issues Concerning Contemporary Human Cloning Technology, Shih (2010) states that human cloning may have two purposes: reproductive and therapeutic (p. 41). In the first case, a cloned embryo
could be implanted into a womb; it would develop as a normal fetus; and a woman would give birth to such a cloned child. In the second case, an early embryo of a patient could be cloned, and then it would be used to produce the embryonic stem cells and cure the patient’s degenerative disease (Shih, 2010, p. 41). These two methods could help infertile couples to have children and ill people to treat their diseases. In addition, adult stem
cells cloning might be used as an alternative to early embryo cloning. Since cloning …
