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There are a number
of situations where it has been suggested that cloning technology
could be applied to make a "copy" of another human being.
- Parents
might wish to "replace" an aborted fetus, dead baby or child
killed in an accident. A grieving woman whose husband and daughter
have been killed in the same car crash, may wish to use the
DNA from one of her daughter's cells and insert it into an egg
supplied by another woman. The child born would be a clone of
her dead daughter. However, the mother would not be "getting
back" the same child that had died.
- In the
case of a child dying of kidney failure and where neither parent
can donate a compatible organ, parents might wish to have a
further sibling, produced by cloning, to be a compatible organ
donor, as this would avoid a rejection reaction. One of this
child's kidneys might then be transplanted to save the life
of their older sibling.
- An individual
might seek to use cloning technology in an attempt, as that
individual might see it, to cheat death.
There are
moral arguments to support the claim that human dignity forbids
the use of human beings only as a "means", holding that they are
to be treated as an "end" in their own right. What implications
do these considerations have for the ethics of human reproductive
cloning? There are many general questions about intervention and
reproductive technology, which are not unique to cloning. For
example, what limits are there on the role of prior choice of
characteristics in offspring, where this is scientifically made
possible. These presumably apply equally to cloning and include
the obvious need for safety issues to be addressed fully. 
A potential
application of human reproductive cloning by nuclear replacement
might be to assist human reproduction. A lesbian couple might
wish to have a child. Here the cell nucleus from one woman could
be inserted into an enucleated egg from the other. The resulting
embryo might then be implanted in the uterus of the woman who
donated the egg. Another scenario might be where both individuals
of a couple are infertile or where the prospective father has
non-functional sperm. In this case, cloning one member of the
couple to create offspring might be envisaged. Would the use of
nuclear replacement techniques be beyond the limit of what is
ethically acceptable to resolve a couple's infertility problem?
Irrespective
of whether it would be desirable, there is considerable doubt
about whether it would even be possible to clone humans using
the techniques used to produce Dolly the sheep. The nuclear replacement
technology used to produce Dolly is still in its early stages.
We do not yet know whether the work which created Dolly is repeatable
in animals, nor is it known whether it can be replicated in humans.
We should bear in mind that Dolly was the only normal lamb born
from 276 similar attempts. Only 29 resulted in implantable embryos,
all of which, except the one leading to Dolly, resulted in defective
pregnancies or grossly malformed births.
Francis
Collins
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