This information sheet reproduces (and summarises where necessary)
the opinions of two opposing organisations. The first is against human
cloning and was written by the Director of the Church of Scotland Society,
Religion and Technology Project.
The second is for human cloning and is a summary of the main points
from the Human Cloning Foundation's article "all the reasons we
should clone humans".
Human cloning - will it ever happen?
One of the abiding sci-fi nightmares has been the idea that we could
one day replicate human beings asexually, just by copying material
from human cells. This was one of the most chilling features of Huxley's
Brave New World. More measured scientific assessments have generally
regarded this as something pretty remote. And many in the churches
and elsewhere hoped it would stay that way.
Roslin's scientists have told a Select Committee of the House of
Commons that the nuclear transfer technique they have applied to produce
Dolly could be, in theory, applied to humans.
Whether anyone would try and whether it would work is another matter.
But the "what if" question must now be asked with much more
seriousness than would have ever been justified before.
Two aspects of the Roslin discovery have set the world of biotechnology
alight. One is the fact that a somatic tissue from an adult has been
used to produce a live animal.
This has rewritten one of the laws of biology. Up to now it had been
assumed that once animal cells go through the mysterious process of
differentiation, and become a particular type of cell, they cannot
go back to being undifferentiated. Now Dr Wilmut's work has caused
a set of cells to forget what they are and start all over again, as
if they were undifferentiated.
The second is that you can clone a large mammal from the cells of
an adult of the species. It is this second aspect that has caught
the public imagination, because it has dramatically brought forward
the question of whether it could be possible to realise the sci-fi
dreams of cloned humans.
Faced with such a fertile prospect, the human imagination runs riot,
and the media have come up with some very bizarre ideas. One article
claimed that we might clone humans to select out genetic defects or
select for desirable traits. This would be impossible just by cloning.
It might in theory be done by germline gene therapy, but that is
quite another, and highly controversial, story. The announcements
that nuclear transfer cloning is possible not only in sheep but cattle
and mice suggests that the technique could be quite general in mammals,
and thus potentially more likely in humans than when it had been done
only on a single sheep.
Scientifically this would be a big and highly dangerous leap to go
from a cloning a sheep to cloning humans, and it is premature to discuss
this as if it were inevitably going to happen. But this discovery
means that we have at least got to ask the question, "What if?".
Dr Wilmut, the scientist involved, and his colleagues at Roslin have
made it quite clear that they think that to clone humans would be
unethical.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority agrees with the
general public impression that to clone human beings would be ethically
unacceptable as a matter of principle.
"I and most people in the Church of Scotland would certainly
agree that on principle, to replicate any human technologically
is something which goes against the basic dignity of the uniqueness
of each human being in God's sight."
Christians would see this as a violation of the uniqueness of a human
life which God has given to each of us and to no one else.
In what sense do we mean this? Some say that that the existence of
"identical" twins means that we should have no ethical difficulty
over cloning, or that to object to cloning implies that twins are
abnormal.
This argument does not hold. Biologically, identical human twins
are not the norm, but the unusual manner of their creation does not
make them any less human. We recognise that each is a uniquely valuable
individual.
There are two fundamental differences between cloning and twinning,
however. Twinning is a random, unpredictable event, involving the
duplicating of a genetic composition which has never existed before
and which at that point is unknown.
Cloning would choose the genetic composition of some existing person
and make another individual with the same genes.
It is an intentional, controlled action to produce a specific known
end. In terms of ethics, choosing to clone from a known individual,
and the unpredictable creation in the womb of twins of unknown genetic
nature belong to categories as different as accidental death is to
murder.
The mere existence of "identical" twins cannot be cited
to justify the practice of cloning.
"Controlling someone else's genetic makeup"
Thus it is not the genetic identity that is the crucial point but
the human act of control, and it is this element of control which
provides the fundamental ethical case against human cloning.
"More than our genes"
The biblical picture of humanity implies that we are far more than
just our genes, or even our genes plus environmental influences, there
is also our spiritual dimension, made in God's image, constituting
a holistic notion of being, in which the relational element is as
important as the individual.
To be a person is to be in relationship. Hence it is vital that the
relational implications of technology are considered alongside the
ontological.
It is against this picture that most Christians would see it ethically
unacceptable to clone human beings as a matter of principle.
In so far as genes are a fundamental part of our make-up, to choose
to replicate the genetic part of human make up technologically is
a violation of a vital aspect of the basic dignity and uniqueness
of each human.
"Controlling other individuals"
By definition, to clone is to exercise unprecedented control over
the genetic dimension of another individual. This is quite different
from the control parents exert in bringing up our children.
Whatever the parents do or do not do, it is inevitable that they
have a profound effect on their children. No one exerts the level
of control involved in preselecting a child's entire genetic-make
up except by a very deliberate act.
Moreover, a child can reject any aspect of its upbringing, but it
could never reject the genes that were chosen for it. Such control
by one human over another is incompatible with the ethical notion
of human freedom, in the sense of that each individual's genetic identity
should be inherently unpredictable and unplanned.
Instrumentality
Cloning raises a number of concerns arising from its consequences,
of which instrumentality and risk are of especial importance.
To replicate any human being technologically is a fundamentally instrumental
act towards two unique individuals - the one from whom the clone is
taken and the clone itself.
In nearly all the speculative ideas for cloning a human would use
the clone as a means towards someone else's end. They would be created
as clones for the primary benefit not of the individuals themselves
but of some third party.
This would be the case for cloning a dying child or parent to help
those bereaved cope with the loss, or cloning an infant with a predisposition
to leukaemia, as a source of bone marrow which would suffer less tissue
rejection problems.
These violate a basic ethical principle, that of creating another
human being other than primarily for their own sake. There is an important
distinction in Christian theology, which admits an instrumental role
for animals, to a limited degree, but prohibits it in humans.
To clone a child with leukaemia to provide compatible bone marrow
would treat the cloned sibling to that extent as a means to an end,
for the benefit of a third party, rather than for their own sake,
and without their consent.
Dorothy Werth cited the controversial US case where this was done
through normal reproduction, but I would question whether the fact
that it worked is justification enough.
Again, it is rightly said that we have mixed motives for why we want
children, but that does not justify treating a child as a means to
an end.
Infertility - an exception to instrumentality
An exception to this objection would be the idea of producing a
child from an infertile couple by cloning one of them. But this raises
other problems.
Instead of being the unique genetic product of both parents, the
child is a copy of one of them. For many Christians this would be
a denial of a basic relational aspect of reproduction, just as in
the case of surrogacy.
For an infertile couple to have a child by cloning either parent
would not normally be thought of as an instrumental act, and might,
at first, sound like a compassionate option to offer to childless
couples.
As observed above, however, there could be serious ethical problems,
notwithstanding the anguish which childlessness brings to many couples.
It would not be the biological child of both parents in the normal
sense. For many this might be seen as taking the technological harnessing
of the desire for a child one step too far, a means which is not justified
by the end.
There is a tendency to demand parenthood as a right, as though it
were some moral absolute.
We are losing the Christian understanding that children are a gift,
not a right which we can presume that God or life should give us on
demand.
Psychological Effects - Identity and Relationship
There are a number of reasons why human cloning might be ruled out
for the psychological dangers involved. No one knows what would be
the effects on human identity and relationships of creating someone
who is the twin of their father or mother, but born in a different
generation and environment.
Would the clone feel that he or she was just a copy of someone else
who's already existed and not really themselves? Am I really someone
else but put into a different womb? What will be my relationship to
the one I was cloned from? No one can predict with any degree of assurance
what the response would be.
Presumably they would vary from person to person. I suggest there
are sufficient dangers and precautionary principles should apply.
In other words, even though one could not be sure how many people
would suffer in this way, it would be wrong knowingly to inflict that
risk on someone. Whose interests are being put first?
Physical Risk
Dolly took 277 attempts and nearly 30 failed pregnancies to get one
success. To repeat the same thing on humans would be giving both the
mother and the potential fetus an unacceptably high risk of damage.
The basic science of fusing the cytoplasm and nucleus and reactivating
the cell is very poorly understood. How many abnormal babies would
have to be produced to get one right? There are sufficient unknowns
about physical problems in pregnancy with cloned sheep and cattle
to suggest that human cloning experiments would violate normal medical
practice.
Roslin researchers have said that there is no experiment that could
be done to prove the safety of human cloning without causing serious
risk to humans in the process. Then there are also unknown factors
of ageing.
How old is Dolly? Is she her age since her birth, or her age since
birth plus the age of the tissue from which she was taken? No one
knows what the effect of nuclear transfer on aging processes.
Social Risk
Finally, human cloning would bring grave risks of abuses to human
dignity and exploitation by unscrupulous people. We have already seen
examples of people offering cloning services for large sums of money,
when there is currently no reasonable prospect of delivery, and apparently
regardless of the risks involved or, in the case of Richard Seed,
the rule of law.
It is also an open door for abuse, in the way that another individual,
a group in society or even the state could exert undue control over
an individual. If anyone ever did unfortunately clone humans, it is
important to counter the suggestion from science fiction that they
would be subhuman androids with human bodies but no souls.
More seriously, some papers from an Islamic perspective seem to imply
that if reproduction is by human artifice, it lacks the spiritual
element.
Some Christians think the same. I do not, however, see any grounds
that a cloned child would be any less human than another child.
Why would God fail to make the child fully "in His image"
just because of the manner of conception? There would need to be considerable
safeguards to avoid the risk of stigmatisation.
It would be foolish to imagine that abuses could not occur.
Medical breakthroughs - Human cloning technology
is expected to result in several miraculous medical breakthroughs.
Medical tragedies - Many people have suffered accidental
medical tragedies during their lifetime. All these people favour cloning
and want the science to proceed.
To cure infertility - The current options for infertile
couples are painful, expensive, and heartbreaking. Cloning has the
potential to change the world for infertile couples, almost overnight.
To fund research - People whose lives have been
destroyed or have not been able to reproduce in this lifetime due
to tragedy could arrange to have their DNA continued and fund research
at the same time.
Bad parents - Human cloning allows you the opportunity
to participate in choosing the parents for your clone.
A child's right to be better than its parents -
It's been suggested that parents have a duty to see that their children
have better lives than they do. This may mean making our children
live longer, helping them to be resistant to cancer, heart disease,
any familial diseases, and all the other problems that can be cured
using what we learn from human cloning technology.
To take a step towards immortality - Human cloning
essentially means taking a human being's DNA and reversing its age
back to zero. Cloning would be a step towards a fountain of youth.
To make a future couple financially secure - With
human cloning you could give a couple in the future both a child from
your DNA and the financial assets from your lifetime to start out
financially secure instead of struggling as most couples do now.
Because you believe in freedom - Freedom sometimes
means having tolerance for others and their beliefs. In a free society
we know that we must tolerate some views that we don't agree with
so that we all may be free. For this reason human cloning should be
allowed.
To be a better parent - Human cloning can improve
the parent-child relationship. Raising a clone would be like having
a child with an instruction manual. You would have a head start on
the needs and talents of your child. We are not saying that a clone
would be a carbon copy with no individuality. Our talents and desires
are genetic, developmental, and environmental. We would have a head
start on understanding the genetic component of a cloned child.
Endangered species could be saved - Through the
research leading up to human cloning we will perfect the technology
to clone animals, and thus we could forever preserve endangered species,
including human beings.
Animals and plants could be cloned for medical purposes
- Through the research leading up to human cloning, we should discover
how to clone animals and plants to produce lifesaving medications.
You want your clone to lead the life that was meant to be
yours - The Human Cloning Foundation has been surprised by
the number of people that write to say that they would like to have
a clone so that it may lead the life that was meant to be theirs.
Typically, these are people who have suffered some terrible physical
or mental handicap and feel robbed of the opportunities they should
have had in life. Some see this life as a sacrifice so that the life
of their clone may be enriched.
To have a better sense of identity - If we had some
information about ourselves, perhaps we could sooner or better discovery
who we are. A clone would have access to a tremendous amount of information
about his or her parent that could greatly help in understanding one's
psyche and physical attributes. All of this information could provide
a better sense of identity.
