QUICK LINKS
Men Reproduce Themselves With Human Cloning
News spread across the country yesterday that Samuel Wood, CEO of privately held STEMAGEN Company, a small biotechnology company near San Diego, announced that they have become the first to document successful cloning of human embryos. (Read Article.)
The San Diego Union-Tribune said," The company's team was giddy with the excitement of finally sharing their accomplishment."
This of course, is troubling for people of faith. However; there are compelling reasons, aside from the moral and theological concerns, for never cloning human beings.
Most all sources, even the World Health Organization, raise considerable concern and arguments against cloning humans. This is a brief overview of those concerns:
1. Physical Harm. Animal cloning has shown substantial risk of debilitating and even lethal conditions occurring in the fetuses.
2. Lack of Research Standards and Accountability. Scientists operating in private institutions do not have the transparency which is essential to this kind of research experimentation.
3. Autonomy. Any child created through somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) would be unable to give consent to the experiment An issue of autonomy would also arise if a person's DNA were used to create one or more copies without that person's permission or perhaps even without his or her knowledge.
4. Conflicts of Interest. Special ethical problems would arise when researchers have a financial interest in the outcome of the studies they would conduct with human subjects.
5. Psychological and Social Harm. The cloned individual may suffer psycologicial harm from it's status as a "genetic copy" of someone else.
6. Dignity. The Universal Declaration on Human Genome and Human Rights, as well as many other documents, state that reproductive cloning is contrary to human dignity.
The following statements are consistently made in these documents.
* Cloning is an asexual mode of reproduction, which is unnatural for humans. A cloned individual will not have two genitic parents; generational lines and family relationships would be distorted.
* Cloning limits the lottery of heritity, which is an essential component in ensuring that each human life is individual.
* Cloning furthers the attitude that people exist to serve purposes set by other people.
The greatest concern to people of faith is simply this. History has proven that when people try to become God or "play" God, the outcome is tragic. Human beings are wonderfully and marvelously made by God the Creator. Made in His likeness and after His image.
Any eugenics scheme that down plays or attempts to interfere with that principle and process must be avoided.
I saw a quote by a university student yesterday who evidently had considerable hesitation about human cloning. He said, "If you mess with mother nature, she will mess with you."
I agree.
_________________
Gary Randall
President
Faith & Freedom
Click here to add these blogs to your email inbox.
9 Comments:
Good article, Gary. Keep up the good work.
Dan in Washington
Well just to combat the RDF (reality distortion field):
1 Cloning is must making a 'twin' - all identical twins are clones - its not really as exciting a concept as the sci-fi programs make it.
2 This company is doing it as a means of producing patient-specific embryonic stem cells, (an issue you do have issue with) not a living human being. Though I guess you could try and implant it few would and there really is no way to prevent it - the technique is actually pretty easy. The reason it was noteworthy is it has been easier to do this procedure with female genetic material than male. Reading their report they've succeeded just because they bothered to try a bit harder than the rest - no special technique, chemicals, etc.
3 Another tempest in a tea pot - the effort being outraged about it could help a dozen street people.
Move on there's nothing to see here.
Oshtur. I think it is more than a temptest in a teapot. The major networks spent considerable time covering the breaking story yesterday morning. I watched The Today Show and they talked about it for at least ten minutes.
Sorry, you're wrong. This affects more than a few street people.
Gary is on course and doing a very good job.
Mark
And there's the problem - you are letting others decide what's important rather than your own reason. Shoot, Britney Spears is covered even more, does that mean she's important?
This is of interest only because this particular variation hasn't been announced before but in reality its just a technical 'bleep' - they've been doing the same with other mammals for years. Replacement of nuclear material in an ovum with that from other cell is old news. Of more interest is they have just done a similar thing with human genes being placed in a cow ovum but even that is just a variation on old news.
This company wanted to be famous and the news agencies wanted to have an exciting story that doesn't make it 'real' news.
There is no indication that any of these techniques have been used to create living people and there's no real way to stop it if someone wanted to as the techniques of genetic replacement is almost the stuff you see in high school science fairs.
So this isn't the 'breakthrough' it pretends to be, its not about what gary wrote about, and there's nothing knowing about will really change. Look up the word 'demagoguery' and understand that it really is your responsibility to filter out fact from hype, even the things you see on 'The Today Show'.
Human cloning is a potential of this research.
Growing tissue that is compatible with a person body is also a potential so that the is no reject of the
body to the tissue.
This a great beak throgh and will save a lot of lives.
Read the article.
http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080118/NEWS10/801180514/1321/NEWS
A human somewhere in the world is going to be cloned. That is a given. It is going to
happen.
Here is the question do you stop an area of research that has the potential of doing great good because it has the potential of doing great harm?
Once again, religion makes much noise opposing scientific advancement. They'll create enough hysteria to slow things down a bit, but rational minds will eventually prevail.
Mankind will be better off because of these advances.
The real issue is - What does God think? Did God give us the ability to make human clones? Why? Why not?
I am open to the idea - what does it matter how a human soul is created?
Sincerely,
Greg
Post a Comment
<< Home