Pros And Cons Of Therapeutic Cloning

When people hear about cloning they imagine an army of duplicate human beings being created in a sterile laboratory to fulfill the desires of achieving the perfect child. Therapeutic cloning is entirely different and does not involve creating a perfect human replica. Instead it creates cells that could be used to replace diseased or damaged cells in the human body providing cures for previously untreatable diseases. However, therapeutic cloning is very controversial as it throws up many ethical and moral questions.

One of the main advantages is that Therapeutic cloning could assist in finding cures for genetic diseases such as multiple sclerosis and heart disease. A privately funded research team at Oregon Health & Science University discovered a technique that eliminates the need to use human embryos but instead an unfertilized egg. To do this they carefully inserted an adult skin cell into a donated human egg whose DNA had been removed. They then used electric pulses to start dividing the cells like normal embryonic
Currently there are over one hundred and twenty three thousand people waiting on an organ transplant and every ten minutes another name is added. On average twenty-one people die every day waiting on an organ donation. However scientists all over the world, including Professor Ian Wilmut and his team at Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, believe that Therapeutic cloning would be the solution to combating these horrific numbers. They believe that with further research they could produce prefect-match organs that would not be rejected by a patient as it would be their DNA. This would mean that someone getting a transplant wouldn’t need to take immunosuppressive drugs as his or her immune system would not react. This claim would mean that no one would need to donate a single organ and go through the painful