"Cloning of a human being is intuitively and properly viewed with almost uniform horror, because replication of a human by cloning would radically alter the very definition of what a human being is," said George Annas, of Boston University

In November of 2001, Scientific American gave a nice overview of cloning.  Human reproductive cloning is an assisted reproductive technology with the goal of creating a newborn genetically identical to another human.  Nuclear transplantation and somatic cell nuclear transfer are the two methods used to initiate the reproductive cloning procedure (Brenning 1).

Scientists begin by first replacing the nucleus of an egg cell with the nucleus of a cell from an adult.  Once stimulated, the cell begins to divide and, if successful, the cell will divide, until it becomes a blastocyst, a pre-implantation embryo composed of approximately 150 cells.  This blastocyst is then placed in a uterus where it can implant and form a fetus, which will then further develop and result in a newborn (Brenning 1).

Dr. Thomas Murray attempted to clear some of falsities in his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives.  One of the important things to note from this is that human cloning will not produce instant copies of humans.  Another misconception about human cloning that needs to be cleared is that the clones will not grow up to be precisely like the person they are cloned from.  Genes are merely the ground plan.  Personalities are made up as well by the experiences of life, often shaped in part by the surrounding people.  No two lives are identical (Murray 1-2). 

For the majority of the population, the debate over human cloning began with Dolly.  In July of 1996, Dr. Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh was thrust into the limelight.  With this successful cloning, the idea of cloning a human became very realistic to the world.  Almost immediately the spark of disagreement turned into a five-alarm fire of many heated debates.  Dr. Wilmut himself is against human cloning, saying that we are not ready to use this technology on humans (Levine 1).  Another key player in the human cloning game is Dr. Richard Seed, an extreme advocate for human cloning to help infertile couples, known for his rebellious attitude against Clinton’s objections to human cloning (Flock 1).

Video Clip: Human cloning: How clones are being made

Here are the three arguments that we are presenting on this issue:

Here is our Annotated Bibliography that describes the sources we used for our research.

© 2003 Dave Neal, Jenna Rodgers, Terry McCoy