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Cell today, baby tomorrow — 2
THE Director of Church of Scotland’s Society, Religion and Technology Project, Dr Ronald Bruce, says: “I consider that in trying to clone humans the Raelian groups are taking unacceptable risks with human beings and acting unethically.”
The Church of Scotland is a leading international authority on the ethical issues of cloning and has close contacts with researchers since 1994. In May 1997 it was one of the first organizations in the world to make a formal declaration against human reproductive cloning.
The Raelians, on the other hand, are a small but diverse group of people who believe that human beings are a failed cloning experiment performed by an extraterrestrial species and have been mercifully left to live on this planet.
It is wrong to produce a human being with a genetic makeup similar to that of an existing or pre-existing human. People should have the right to a genetic makeup that is unique to them. Furthermore, it is wrong to give others the right to determine the genes of someone, yet to be born.
Reproductive cloning also involves unacceptably high risks in humans. In early 2002 there were reports that the cloning of primates had failed, revealing a “gallery of horrors” in the embryos, meaning that the genetic setup was a horrible mess. A carefully controlled experiment was carried out to clone mice, resulting in unusually early deaths due to liver failure and pneumonia.
There is also the apparent fact that some people wish to use cloning as a means for coping with a tragic bereavement. This is an illusion because the child produced would be a new and different individual and would have to be treated as such.
The child may appear the same, but various factors come into play when determining a person’s individuality. These are termed as environmental factors and although they may be prone to react similarly as their “successor,” they may be exposed to different events leading to a different person.
Ethically, replicating any human using technology is against the basic dignity of uniqueness genetically provided by God. It would thus also be a desecration of the uniqueness of human life.
There are arguments that the existence of identical twins is justification enough to allow cloning and that objecting to cloning implies that twins are abnormal.There are, however, differences between the two.
For one thing, twinning is a random event, involving the duplication of a genetic composition that has not existed before and is not known at the time. Cloning, on the other hand, chooses the genetics of an actual individual to make a copy. It is an intentional, controlled action to a known end.
Choosing to clone from a known individual and the capricious creation of twins belong to two separate categories, as different as accidental death and murder. In the sequence of events that led to the creation of Dolly, who should have been consulted and at what stage?
While talking of cloning, people often coin the phrase “playing at God” because they fail to comprehend the possibilities and the potential of the new technology. They also appear to ignore the fact that the cards have been dealt —domestication of animals has produced livestock different from the original predecessors long ago; a longer life expectancy due to new medications, improved parental care, vaccinations, and the use of antibiotics. So, why stop now?
A crucial point to consider here is the human act of control. Religious viewpoints lead us to believe that we are not just life based on genes, but that a spiritual factor is involved too. The assertion that we are made in God’s image, and are thus holy, makes this issue as important as the person’s individuality.
Technology disturbs this picture and thus religious leaders are strictly opposed to the concept of cloning, which they regard to be the disruption of a person’s communion with the holy spiritual dimension.
This is unlike the control exerted by parents over their children; it can be rejected, whereas the genetic makeup cannot be. Such control over another is in direct conflict with the concept of human freedom. Moreover, there are additional risks to the cloned individual, psychological, physical as well as social.
No one can imagine the effects on the identity and relationships of the concerned individual because he or she may be a clone of their father’s brother, born in a different time and environment. What would the clone feel if he found out that he was simply a copy of someone else?
No one can predict the responses of the individual in question. May be he would differ between the cloned individuals. Even though it would not be known how many clones would suffer in this way, it would be wrong to knowingly inflict this kind of trauma on a human being.
It took 277 attempts and nearly 30 failed pregnancies to create Dolly. Would any sane person willingly inflict this kind of demoralization and damage on both the mother and potential child? The fusion of the nucleus and cytoplasm is still not understood well and the possible number of deformed or dead babies because of failed cloning should be discouraging for any scientist.
There are also unknowns regarding the ageing processes of clones. Was Dolly her age since her birth or should her age be calculated after taking into account the age of the original?
There are grave risks involved for cloned individuals. Unscrupulous people may exploit their dignity. Cloning services have been offered regardless of the potential disasters. If a human being is cloned successfully, it is vital to counter the potential fictitious belief that they would be sub-human androids without souls, which is implied in some papers.
Why would God fail to make the child “in His image” just because of the unusual form of conception? There must be ensured safeguards to avoid stigmatization.
“Islam has a very progressive and pragmatic viewpoint when it comes to stem cell research. This is a departure from many other religions,” said Saeed Khan, director and senior fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, at the Islam Awareness Week held by the Harvard Islamic Society not long ago.
“Protestants, Jews and Muslims actually have a lot in common in the area of genomics,” he said. “None of the three have an official consensus, but all three advocate a very methodological and careful approach to genomics.”
“The Quran does speak in an indirect way about cloning,” Mr Khan said after reading several passages from the Holy Quran on human embryo development. Mr Khan projected the possibility of discovering a “gay gene,” and speculated whether Muslim parents would have an obligation to remove it.
One article claimed that we might clone humans to remove genetic defects or select for desirable traits. This would be almost impossible just by cloning. In theory, this may be done by germ-line gene therapy, but that is quite another story.
The announcements that nuclear transfer cloning is possible not only in sheep but also in cattle and mice suggests that the technique could be quite general in mammals, and potentially more likely in humans than on sheep.
Scientifically, it would be quite difficult to shift from cloning a sheep to cloning humans and it is premature to discuss this as if it were inevitably going to happen. However, this discovery means that we should at least ask ourselves “what if…?”
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