Sarah Franklin explains in Dolly Mixtures how Dolly is the first mammal cloned by taking a somatic cell from an adult sheep using nuclear transfer. The importance of Dolly is the discovery of mature cells to be reversed to a younger stage where they are able to expand their knowledge of what duties to do. This knowledge has led humans to biological control that presents limitless possibilities. But this knowledge of the ability to create organic beings holds great ethical issues as the abuse of power comes into play. What should be the requirements to clone and what are the boundaries?
Many argue that cloning should be used just for scientific purposes to seek knowledge of how to cure diseases and to help animals in the brink of extinction. But it is simple to see the ethical issues regarding the treatment of the proposed cloned animals that would help us gain knowledge of certain diseases and end their extinction. Animals are being engineered to have certain diseases and then placed in experiments. Are cloned animals subject to animal protection laws? If extinct animals were to be cloned, what would be the impact on the environment and those animals that had to adapt to live? The process for cloning extinct animals would have to be a strenuous one as questions of which extinct animals are worthy of revival and what purpose would they serve in today’s world.
The most troubling aspect of cloning would have to be its relation to humans. Should we be allowed to experiment with the human genome? We have certainly used science to help us combat diseases with medicines and treatments that aim at cellular level like Chemotherapy. How different would it be if cloning is used to genetically engineer humans to not have deathly, terminal diseases? To fight the failure of organs, cloning could perhaps be used to generate healthy organs for such people. All of this would be ideal, but it would only be a result of countless of human experiments and even then such usage of cloning would not be restricted to life or death situations. To attain the ideal level of cloning much human experimentation would be needed, just as in the cloning of animals. There would be many failures at the expense of human beings. Supplementary, many would argue that humans should not be allowed to play the role of “God” and decided who can live. If cloning were to be perfected, what would be the boundaries to the level of control we have to engineer a human being? Should we be able to pick and choose how we want a human being to look?
Biological control will continue to be subject of wonder and scrutiny. Its proposition of endless possibilities creates a vast horizon of knowledge and improvement, but also a question of whether we should even try to find out what the horizon is. Cloning and biological control is surely a door we cannot easily cross or close.
Pedro: this is a well-structured post, with a nice sampling of the author's views, others' views ("they say"), and your own views ("I say"). Questions predominate, but that's not surprising given the state of the science and the ethical debates surrounding cloning.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to pick out two of your points in particular, one concerning the pseudo-"fountain of youth" effect of Wilmut's procedure, and the other regarding the possibility of returning extinct species to life. Both points gesture to the centrality of time in these cloning narratives and our own human tendency to see life as a linear and teleological process that begins at birth and ends at death. Cloning, "immortalized" cell lines, in vitro (vs. in vivo) culturing, taxidermy... all of these procedures call into question the concept of aging and the inherent limitations of the human body.
Sorry for like being a leech but I can't post anything on this website for some reason, all I can do is comment, so I am going to post my post for this week as a comment to your post. Sorry again.
ReplyDeleteWhen do we say enough?
In reading Sarah Franklin’s chapter entitled “Sex” one thing really stuck out to me. The quote “the difference cloning makes is not so much sexual as technical: it is a means to change sex in order to achieve specific technological goals, such as the more rapid amplification of flocks of transgenic sheep, for which somatic cell nuclear transfer, or remixed sex, is the most efficient mechanism” was the first thing that stuck out to me. This quote stuck out to me because it reminded me of the movie Gattaca, a movie about a time when the advancements of technology could allow parents to chose the characteristics of their children as well as get ride of some, for example, anger and a desire to fight or kill. It seems that as humans we are always shaking the cage, pushing ourselves to the limit as I think we should. I believe that to grow and get better we need to push ourselves to the limit constantly to expand it. This is what happening with technology. We are pushing ourselves with technology and what we can do with it and greatly expanding the limits but when is enough? When do we say that we have done enough? According to most movies we don’t know the answer to that question. In almost all science fiction movies humans never knew when to stop pushing the limits with technology and three things resulted from that: mankind was destroyed by their very own technology, mankind kept pushing the limits with technology in new places (planets), or mankind was destroyed by the effects of their pursuits. In Gattaca, mankind was steadily pushing the limits of technology to other planets. In Terminator, mankind was destroyed by their own technology and in Stargate SG1, the Asgard were dying out because they had damaged themselves so much genetically that they could no longer reproduce or clone themselves. When do we say enough? When it comes to cloning it is hard to say. With the Asgard every time they cloned themselves a little bit of the genetic makeup deteriorated so after hundreds and hundreds of years of cloning themselves their genetic makeup was so deteriorated that cloning was no longer an option. When do we say enough? When the costs outweigh the benefits or when it is already too late; according to recent times that might be the answer.
Keenan: This is an interesting division of effects, and thanks for the pop culture references! I do think popular culture (TV, movies, music, etc.) is an arena in which many of our culture's fears and desires get played out, so it's smart to think about what we end up seeing at the theater or on the boob tube.
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