Benefits of Cloning (Pros)
In the medical field, cloning is used to find out about
many genes that cause diseases. Cloning also is used
to cure diseased (this is called "gene therapy").
A person can find out if he or she has inherited a gene
on a chromosome from an affected parent, by a procedure
called "genetic screening". If that person
has the affected gene, it is possible that he or she
will develop the disease.
Gene Therapy can be very useful in curing some diseases. What this does
is that a normal gene is introduced into cells of people with a "defective"
gene. Thus, the normal gene will behave as if there is no defect, and
the patient becomes better. Many scientists are using this technique to
try to find cures for cancer and AIDS. However, it is still a very novel
technology.
Cloning can be used to improve the quality of the crops that we eat.
It makes the plants resistant to herbicides, pest damage, infections and
diseases. Cloned plants such as wheat, rice, maize, soybean, potato and
others have been produced and are ready to be introduced into agriculture
in the new future.
Police can also use cloning for the purpose of identification. This procedure
is called genetic fingerprinting. It is done by extracting
the DNA from blood, or any body fluid, such as saliva
or blood, and cutting the DNA with restriction enzymes.
Each individual has many unique pieces of the cut DNA;
you can match the person's bodily fluid with the police
sample you have examined.
Possible Advantages
Human cloning could produce many benefits. Human therapeutic cloning could provide genetically identical cells for regenerative medicine, and tissues and organs for transplantation. Such cells, tissues, and organs would neither trigger an immune response nor require the use of immunosuppressive drugs.
Both basic research and therapeutic development for serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, as well as improvements in burn treatment and reconstructive and cosmetic surgery, are areas that might benefit from such new technology.
Human reproductive cloning also would produce benefits. Antinori and Zavos hope to create a fertility treatment that allows parents who are both infertile to have children with at least some of their DNA in their offspring.
Some scientists, including Dr. Richard Seed, suggest that human cloning might obviate the human aging process. How this might work is not entirely clear since the brain or identity would have to be transferred to a cloned body.
Dr. Preston Estep has suggested the terms "replacement cloning" to describe the generation of a clone of a previously living person, and "persistence cloning" to describe the production of a cloned body for the purpose of obviating aging, although he maintains that such procedures currently should be considered science fiction.
In Aubrey de Gray's proposed SENS (Strategy for Engineered negligible senescence) one of the considered options to repair the cell depletion related to cellular senescence is to grow replacement tissues from stem cells harvested from a cloned embryo.
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