The problems with human cloning
What’s stopping scientists from creating lab-grown people?
What if there were two of you? You could finish your chores and errands in half the time, juggle those overlapping social engagements or let one of you work while the other takes a mini vacation. In theory the idea of cloning ourselves might seem like a no-brainer, but in actuality, creating human clones is rife with brain-stretching scientific and moral obstacles.
Since the creation of Dolly, the first cloned mammal, the last 20 years have been filled with many examples of DNA being taken from different species of animals, such as rabbits, rats, dogs and horses, and successfully creating a copy. Although the science works for those species, it’s not a one-size-fits-all technique.
One of the main challenges in human reproductive cloning is replicating our life span. The genetic information that is used as the instruction manual for cloning comes from the nucleus in an adult cell. As adult cells grow and divide, over time the end portions of our chromosomes, known as telomeres, shorten a little with each division. By the time we reach adulthood chromosome telomeres are quite short, so after implanting adult chromosomes into an embryonic egg, the chromosomes shorten beyond the normal amount. This shortening would lead to clones developing life-threatening conditions and typically halving their life span when compared to their DNA donors, as seen in animal studies. Other biological hurdles occur during the process of extracting the nucleus from the donor egg. For example, during removal vital proteins within the cell that are important for cell division can also be unwittingly removed.
Human cloning is also a moral and ethical minefield. Would human clones become enslaved and be deemed sub-human? Is bringing the DNA of a deceased loved one back to life the right thing to do? Along with the scientific obstacles of human cloning, the dilemmas it poses are challenging to overcome. As it currently stands we are not technologically advanced nor morally prepared enough to bring biological doppelgängers into the world.