Clone Wars Or Clone Revolution?

           Probably, all of you heard of sheep Dolly – the first mammal cloned in Scotland in 1996. which lived for six years. After Dolly, scientists successfully cloned other mammals such as cat, rat, deer, dog, horse, mule and ox. Not so long ago the scientists have cloned two perfectly healthy monkeys (long-tailed macaques), using the same technique. In addition, this technique could be applied to humans species, as well. 

As much as this seems like a miraculous progress of a mankind, cloning has been a taboo topic for many years due to the variety of (I’d say justified) concerns:
• Many things could potentially go wrong in terms of the cloned person's health.
• The abuse of eugenics – a belief system that aims at improving the genetic quality of a human population.
• Possible difficulty regarding separating out the personality of the “new” person from that of the DNA donor.
• Religious concerns and etc.

PROS

Cloning can allow those couples, where one partner has some genetic and inherited disease, to have a healthy child. In this case, cloning is considered as an asexual type of reproduction (the process of producing genetically identical individuals; e.g. bacteria, viruses, some algae, and some fungi use this way for reproduction).

Cloning people could allow scientists to study all details about human development. It could lead to valuable knowledge. This, however, can be very instructive. Since there are many details about embryo and fetus unfamiliar to science, there could be a remarkable discovery. My opinion on this is quite positive because this could be a huge step towards the cure for most genetic diseases and others health issues. But, this leads us to a question: to what extent these researches should be allowed due to ethical and legal factors?

POSSIBLE CONS

Cloning could easily result in little genetic diversity. The scenario with one entire population of people susceptible to the exact same diseases, viruses, and other defects isn’t something anyone with common sense would agree with.
What is the clone’s relationship to his/her donor?

Cloning might be a good solution for people who are sterile. But, the question is if the cloned person should call his/her donor a mother/father? Or would it be a sister or brother? Okay, think about twins. They are made from the same cell. How should they look at each other?

Cloning people could be easily used for bad purposes. As a race that can go from creative and inspired to insane, egoistic and opportunistic, it’s obvious that there could be someone (or many of them) who would abuse this technology for their own benefit. Imagine some big bad corporations making their ‘army of clones’ just like in “Star Wars”!
Not to mention that the issue with human trafficking would be much worse than it is right now.

THE OUTCOMES?

It’s difficult to anticipate them completely. Cloning is obviously a huge intersection of ethical, moral, religious, legal and scientific points of views. When it comes to humans, the truth is that successfully cloned human would confirm Huxley’s “Brave New World” (serial copy of humans) as a new reality. Those who defend cloning as something useful to humanity claim that, in the future, we could avoid genetic mistakes, such as wrong number of chromosomes. But, the idea that would rise like a phoenix would be the one of a pure race, as well as hatred towards defects. And it would bring only suffering.

What we know is that a soul can’t be cloned. Psyche can’t be replicated. This might be a cliché, but no one can escape their own uniqueness. We may look the same, but we will never experience life in the very same way. However, if the mankind hits that point when human cloning is no longer an experimentation process, the Pandora’s box of the variety of issues will be open. First, it will take time for a human race to fully embrace the new way of creation. Maybe the term “clone” will be perceived as offensive. Identity theft will be difficult to track. These are only a few drops in the sea of reasons why governments, as well as the general public, wouldn’t allow extension of cloning from nonhuman mammals to humans in the near future.

In the end, how eerie would it be to see someone physically identical to you (or not)?

Stormtrooper, from https://pixabay.com/en/stormtrooper-star-wars-lego-storm-2899993/