Cloning Essay
“… just because we could do something scientifically doesn’t mean we should do it.”
- Greg Jaffe
Cloning is a very controversial aspect in life. I believe that cloning is full of moral issues. Nowadays, cloning could be done, but unless it’s done for scientific purposes, I consider it bad. For example, if a person is cloned, how would be the life of the clone? What about his thoughts, his memories? The clone would be born as an adult. Additionally, if these clones are made for an evil purpose they would be treated as machines not as people. But then, what would happen if two clones are in love like in the movie “The Island”, would they be consider as people? These are few of the many questions that cloning leaves open to human opinion.
If cloning is a polemic topic, imagine how would be cloning more than seventy organisms from a single egg. Aldous Huxley writes about the problem of cloning, even when in 1930’s this topic wasn’t so important. He talks about a future dystopia with cloning as the central theme: “By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos (…)” (Huxley, 2005: 7). It opens now a new possibility, could clones feel and think or not. If they don’t, starting from the idea of having more than 70 identical people, the consideration of this group of organisms wouldn’t be of humans anymore but sort of a robot army.
On the other hand, if clones feel and think, how could they live along knowing that they’re all equal? It has been said that twins which come from the same embryo, have a special connection. For example, the sharing of dreams and even thoughts are between the considerations. The differentiation of this large group of identical people would be impossible. After discussing the two points of view, the characteristics of humans comparing them to clones could help in the affirmation of the clone concept.
Humans are born from an embryo, as clones are. Even when clones don’t live as much as humans, talking about the child life, there must be something registered in their brains, whether artificial or not. Talking about feelings remits the topic to other works. For example, in Michael Bay’s movie, “The Island”, a similar situation is shown to the one of the novel. In the movie Bay mixes up cloning with love. With this he states clones could reach the level of developing feelings. And it is almost impossible not to develop feelings after sharing a considerable part of the short lifetime of a clone with another.
To sum up, after analyzing a little about the huge topic that cloning implies, uncertain conclusions can be done. Clones in their overall characteristics resemble humans. Abilities, feelings or source are some of the characteristics clones are people. That’s why, in my opinion, clones if extremely necessary, should be done and considered as people. Preferably, I think cloning shouldn’t be done, at least in humans in order to prevent moral issues about it.
Bibliography:
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1st edition, New York: Harper Torch, 2005.
