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Asked by anon-74270 on 1 May 2020.
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Rosina Simmons answered on 1 May 2020: last edited 1 May 2020 9:43 am
This is such an interesting question!
We can clone animals, and have been successful with this! The first “big” animal” that was successfully cloned was Dolly the Sheep in 1996, if you want to read about her. Since then scientists have clone animals for a number of reasons; sometimes it’s for lab experiments because having many copies of an identical animal means one less variable for an experiment to control for.
Humans are also animals, and we reproduce in the same way as sheep, monkeys, whales, kangaroos and cats. It’s entirely possible to clone a human with the technologies we have now to clone other animals BUT it’s illegal.
As for why it’s not allowed by law to happen, there are a number of reasons. One of which is the long-standing debate of “playing God”… is it right that we make another one of us? Why should we make a copy of a person? Perhaps a healthy copy of the original person if the first gets ill and needs an organ transplant that will definitely work?… But then when the copy-person grows up, they will have the same feelings as the original person, they will be scared and happy and enjoy all sorts of sports and going to school. Do they have the same rights as the original person? Should they treated the same way? You can see how this is a delicate situation. So the ability to clone a human has been made illegal.
Also it’s shown that cloned animals do seem to have more health problems than their original animal. They get sick more easily it seems and end up getting more cancer or illness that shortens their lifespans. If that’s the same for a human if we clone them, perhaps it’s unfair to clone a human with all our feelings and fears and hopes, for them to have a possibly worse and unhealthy life?
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Sophie Louth answered on 4 May 2020:
Sometime scientists and engineers answer questions like can we clone humans without necessarily thinking through the ethics. Ethics is to do with whether it is a good idea. So we have people whose job it is to think about whether it is ethical to do something. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is not ethical to clone humans so it is illegal in pretty much every country.
There are quite a few technologies that use stem cells which are very early cells that can turn into anything, and these cause much more debate as to whether they are ethical. Some people think they are because they can help people. And some people think they are not because it is too similar to cloning people.
So as scientists we have to think about both whether we can do something, but also whether we should.
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