By: Trasani Klarissa

 Nowadays, due to the rapid advancement in the fields of biotechnology and medical science, new discoveries seem to give rise to controversies. A very debatable timely issue is “cloning”.

When Dolly was created, the announcement fired the imagination of the people. It was perceived and speculated that the process of human cloning was not far away and there were many who were eager to unravel the mysteries of nature and human life. Indeed, today the modern world has been divided into two opposing sides concerning whether human cloning should be allowed or not. More specifically, the tangible research and improvements paved the way for a series of ethical and legal policy debates in the field of human cloning.

On the one hand, there are many arguments who are in favuor of human cloning. These are:

The Reproductive Cloning: Some people believe that through reproductive cloning, parents will have their children matching their wishes and wills, while

infertile couples will be able to have children.

The Therapeutic Cloning: What is more, a patient, suffering from a disease like cancer, will be able to restore his cells through therapeutical cloning, while

there is the possibility of putting an end to a disease, which would otherwise

be inherited onto the next generations.

However, the creation of human life by humans makes many ordinary people as well as intellectuals, theists or atheists, scientists and humanists to find the idea repulsively offensive and grotesque. Towards this direction, there are some arguments posed by the side opposing the cloning of humans:

Two philosophical objections exist. The first is that cloning violates God’s will

by creating an infant using a “man-made technique”. The other philosophical

objection is that cloning is contrary to nature in a way that does not depend

on the natural process of procreation. Additionally, human cloning is a process that is completely outside common sense and the way we perceive the world. Cloning humans, who constitute a more complex organism than animals, has

not yet be scientifically proclaimed to be safe. Thus, the cloned individual will be prone to diseases as many clones have died fairly quickly due to unexpected complications.

World policies on human or reproductive cloning range from complete prohibition to no policies on record. Over 30 countries, including France, Germany, and the Russian Federation, have banned human cloning altogether. Fifteen countries, such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Israel, have banned human reproductive cloning, but permit therapeutic cloning.

To sum up, human cloning does not hold a good or bad meaning. On the

contrary, it itself is neutral; the ethical aspect of cloning exactly depends upon the intentions of the cloners whereas ethical values seem the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.