People are talking about it. Debating about it. Reminding many of the horror movies which show the creation of human monsters or of armies of superhuman soldiers. Others consider it an astounding medical breakthrough to cure diseases. Finally, many are confused as to the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual impact of it. This report referred to the human cloning technology. Yes, no less than the members of the United Nations are voting on whether or not to ban human cloning technology totally or partially.
Our country as well as other countries like Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, and the Vatican advocates the total banning of human cloning. Other countries like United Kingdom, Singapore, and China favor the partial banning of human cloning.
One may ask: What is cloning? Human cloning? Cloning is the production of one or more individual plants or animals that are genetically identical to another plant or animal. For several years now, cloning has been successfully carried out on many species of animals. Not so with human embryos where the experimentation is yet on a very limited scale. Cloning is more accurately referred to as embryo cloning which involves the removal of one or more cells from an embryo and encouraging the cell to develop into one or more duplicate embryos with the same or identical DNA as the original embryo, resulting in twins or triplets or even more identical human duplicates. (Michael C. Brannigan, 2001)
Since the late 1970s cloning of embryos has been tried in mice. In the late 1980s, experimentation on other animals was done like pigs, cows, monkeys, cats, goats, and sheep. Remember Dolly, the cloned sheep? It was an example of the disastrous imperfect replicas caused by genetic defects. And to think that as of Nov. 3, 2003, 3,000 to 5,000 clones animals have already been produced............
