Stop scientists from cloning humans

IT IS PATENT that human cloning should not proceed to the clinical research stage. A moratorium on clinical trials of human cloning is warranted on safety grounds, as there is no pathway from animal to pre-clinical to clinical human experimentation that would not involve significant risks to human children. As we have noted elsewhere, it is doubtful even in the long term that an individual or couple will present a rationale for the use of human cloning technologies that is compelling when balanced against the risks.

Leading cloning experts and developmental biologists have told that the cloning process seemed to create random errors in the expression of individual genes -- mistakes that can produce any number of unpredictable problems, at any time in life.

Among the defects routinely encountered among clones are mice which grow to be enormously obese, and cows born with enlarged hearts or lungs that do not develop properly, according to the Times.

During World War II, the Nazis implemented a program of eugenics with the aim of eliminating "undesirables" from the human gene pool. Setting ethics aside, from a purely biological point of view, when you begin to artificially manipulate the gene pool by cloning, you may lower diversity and place the population at an increased risk for death on a large scale because of environmental changes.

There are genuine ethical concerns involved with the potential for human cloning. Currently, people have not come up with any compelling reason to pursue human cloning that would override these ethical concerns about using human clones. Husain writes, "I hope that the leaders in our community of science are stable enough to trust themselves with risky research." Does he have enough trust to let them to decide for themselves whether such risky research is inherently worthwhile?