Cloning: A Review on Bioethics

With the discovery of therapeutic cloning and the advancements with the ‘success’ of cloning animals and the companies that make money offering to clone the pets of both the rich and the regular people, it’s not hard to imagine that cloning humans would be the next logical step in this timeline. However, cloning humans is far from the scientific breakthrough that it would seem to be from first glance. There are already a large number of ethical problems that stem from animal cloning as it exists today that goes against all manners of bioethics.

Those problems would only get worse and bring forth even more ethical dilemmas should the process of cloning be expanded to humans as well as animals. One of the biggest issues with cloning is that the risks far outweigh the benefits. Despite Dolly, the cloned sheep born in 1996, being the poster child of the cloning process, many people outside of the scientific community don’t know much about the actual effectiveness of the cloning process.

Cloning is known to have a high failure rate, with as many as 90% of attempts ending in failure. (PETA) Dolly was the only survivor of 277 attempts at cloning. While cloning dogs is slightly more successful than other animals, there is still the unfortunate fact that dozens of dogs are forced to undergo repeated traumatic procedures and operations in order to create one dog. Practitioners in the cloning field like to argue that while the cloning process for surrogates is admittedly very intrusive, it is generally not a very painful procedure.

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Unfortunately, that is not the case for the poor animals involved. According to Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford, cloning dogs is unethical because it causes more suffering than natural reproduction. For the cloning process to be successful, the surrogates must be injected with hormones that are given to humans going through I.V.F., which is not good for dogs, especially when it has to be injected into them over and over again. (Duncan) This is a scenario that sounds eerily similar to the situation of the women in the Handmaiden’s Tale, where hundreds of women are forced to be surrogate mothers for the barren elite, going through a number of dehumanizing and brutal rituals just to produce one child and having to repeat the process over and over again for an unknown amount of time.

Essentially, the handmaidens in the story are seen as nothing more than reproduction machines. While it is doubtful that society would ever get to the point of women being forced to be the surrogates for clones of paying customers rich or otherwise, the idea of the rich elite risking the life and safety of surrogates for the slim chance of successfully producing a healthy clone is still a very real and dehumanizing possibility that may present itself should human cloning become an actuality. There is also the fact that most clones live shorter lives than their predecessors or with the same problems that cloners hope to avoid. Dolly the sheep lived until she was 6 years old, which is half the life of the average sheep, from both lung cancer and arthritis and Snuffy died from the same cancer that his predecessor had at age 12. (Bargon) Scientists would essentially be wasting resources and risking lives cloning humans that would either live shorter lives or just end up dying from the same diseases that their predecessors died from.

Another example of the flaws of cloning is Snuffy, the dog that was cloned in South Korea. While Snuffy’s creation was considered a success by those is favor of the cloning business, it’s less of a breakthrough when you consider that many clones either fail to take hold in the uterus or die shortly after birth. This was the case with Snuffy’s twin, who died not long after being born. Snuffy’s success is even less glamorous when one considers that Snuffy and his deceased twin were two of three pregnancies that resulted from more than 1,000 embryos implanted into 123 surrogates. (Brogan) Jessica Pierce, an ethicist and dog expert also likens it to the Handmaiden’s Tale, believing that it’s “..a canine version of reproductive machines.” (Duncan) Another thing that one must keep in mind that dogs are considered one of the easier animals to clone, which is why there is such a huge market for cloning dogs in the first place. If these many problems exist with cloning dogs, imagine the complications that come with cloning humans, who scientists have a hard time cloning now due to the complexity of human stem cells. Scientists would be risking the safety and comfort of hundreds of surrogates for very little success, with an even larger risk of injury or death, due to the complexity of human stem cells.

Another potential problem with cloning humans is the possibility that people will take to cloning their dead loved ones in order to avoid the cost of having to deal with the grief of their death. In March of 2018, a story was published about a woman named Monni Murst who had cloned the dog belonging to her eldest daughter, Miya Murst, a photographer who had committed suicide. When her daughter’s dog, Billy, turned 13 and it was becoming clear that the dog was going to die as well, Murst was devastated. According to her, “The thought of losing Billy dying was more than I could handle.” (Sheridan) To combat this feeling, Murst decided to clone her daughter’s dog. While this initially doesn’t count as a cause for concern, the trouble came when Murst was interviewed by Antonio Regalado for his piece in the Guardian. Murst tells Regardo that when she got news of the clone’s heartbeat from the veterinarians, she noticed that the cloned dog shared the same birthday as her deceased daughter. According to her, “It [was] a sign. For me, it [was] a sign that Miya [was] involved and aware.” (Regalado) For Regalado, this sent off warning alarms in his head, and for good reason. Murst was using the cloned dog as a way to preserve the life of her daughter. What’s even more troubling is that when asked about whether she would have cloned Miya if it was possible at the time, she said that it was a question that she had no answer to.

What’s even more concerning about people potentially cloning loved ones is that predatory companies and businesses can prey on the emotional vulnerability of grieving parents by promising that they can replicate their dead loved ones. When Barbara Streisand lost her dog and had them cloned, she explained that her reason for doing so was that she didn’t want to go through the pain of losing her beloved dog. Many surgeons argue that there is nothing wrong with providing these services to pet owners. After all, they see their pets as family so it would make sense that pet owners would like to extend that relationship for as long as possible. However, many cloning companies are predatory for their false promises of replicating a pet owner’s beloved pet in its entirety. While a few companies stress that the cloned dogs aren’t exact replicas of lost pets, other companies go head-on with that assumption, trying to get as much money as they can out of emotionally vulnerable people. According to Vicki Katrinak, a program manager for animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States, “Pet cloning doesn’t replicate a pet’s personality.” (Sheridan) Everything that makes people unique-their quirks, temperaments, and their interests- can not be replicated in a clone.

Clones are likely to not bear any behavioral resemblance to their predecessors even if they share the same DNA and there more than a few companies that fail to mention that when pitching their services to vulnerable pet owners. Considering that many researchers believe that human cloning is not that far off, if human cloning becomes a reality, we will see the rise of morally bankrupt human cloning companies, preying on emotionally vulnerable people and selling them the fantasy of being able to be clone a 100% replica of their lost relatives and loved ones. There is also the possibility of cloning companies exploiting poorer people who desire to clone their loved ones as well. According to practitioners, cloning is a very expensive process, especially in the case of animals that have very specific times to become surrogates for clone embryos, meaning that it is more time consuming and expensive.

While cloning companies make their prices well known to their customers, they are not exactly unwilling to provide their services for those who are not as well off, as long as you can pay and can provide the DNA, they’ll perform the cloning. As most people aren’t as well off as others, they have to sacrifice more for a process that yields less than favorable results in the long term. The only morally sound thing to do regarding human cloning is to outright ban it before it can become an issue and to end the current practice of cloning dogs completely according to the consequentialist theory of morality, specifically act-utilitarianism. According to the theory of act-utilitarianism, right actions are those that directly produce the greatest overall good. In this case, the outright banning of both human and animal cloning falls that definition.

Cloning practices like therapeutic cloning are impressive and important scientific advancements but going any further than that would be unethical. There are just far too many risks to the people involved in the process of cloning for there to be any real benefit from doing so. On top of that, the exploitative nature of the cloning market and their specific targeting of grieving loved ones in order to turn a profit is abhorrent and only leads to consumers being made false promises and having unrealistic expectations for the clones that they’ve ordered. When one considers all the risks, the potential harm that can be done, and who will suffer the most from this, it is only right that cloning as a whole be banned and that cloning companies be disbanded and outlawed for good.