The Problem Of Medical Benefits - 2467 Words

In animal and human cloning alike, arguments over ethicality boil down to a matter of medical benefits versus moral concerns. Governmental and social groups are split by the benefits of therapeutic, reproductive, and molecular cloning, which bring their own moral rewards in the preservation of life, and the grey areas cloning brings on matters of protection of morals and individuality. Through cloning technology, medical science will learn to renew activity of damaged cells by growing new cells and replacing them, yet concerns are raised over the possibility of compromising individualities or violating the rights of the cell. Cloning gives the capability to create humans with identical genetic makeup to act as organ donors for each other,†¦show more content†¦As of now, there are three types of cloning, each with their own potentials and moral arguments against. Molecular cloning, also known as recombinant DNA technology, DNA cloning, and gene cloning†, entails the tra nsfer of DNA from an organism to a self-replicating genetic element such as a bacterial plasmid. A bacterial plasmid is a small DNA molecule within a cell that is separated from a chromosomal DNA and can replicate independently. The DNA of interest can then be cultivated in a foreign host cell. This technology has been around since the 1970s, and has become a common practice in molecular biology labs today. Molecular cloning provides scientists with an essentially unlimited quantity of any individual DNA segments derived from any genome. As molecular cloning does not go beyond a molecular level or involve stem cells, there is little that is morally reprehensible about it, and is left alone. Stem cells are a major concern for activist groups in that stem cells come from embryos that are three to five days old. At this stage, an embryo is called a blastocyst and has about 150 cells, which can divide into more stem cells or can become any type of cell in the body. Therapeutic cloning, which is the production of human embryos for use in research, becomes more of an ethical issue in its use of embryonic stem cells. The