Back in 5 July 1996 – 14 February 2003, Dolly was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. he was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in Scotland.

Those same people are trying to succeed with the cloning of a Humanoid. Some people say "cloning of ANY kind should be banned" it goes against their religion. And some say it could be a great idea, "We can bring back our great 'Minds' from the grave such as Einstein and what not! They could help us improve this world!" Sad thing is that the clones dont live that long!

My thoughts about cloning is, it should be left in the hands of the Gods! No mere man could, or should posses the power to create life through, unless through reproduction. I believe its crossing a line, something or someone that is dead, died for a reason and should stay that way...

What are your views on it? Is this too much power for mere mortals? Are we crossing a line from Humanity to Gods? Should Cloning be banned?? What do you all think? Im curious to know.

-C57

I don't think cloning is too much power for man. If we can clone things, we can cure diseases like AIDS and cancer. Cloning doesn't overstep any bounds. The only thing that should stop humankind from doing something is our lack of creativity to think it up.

Clone away!

coda57 : I think your right. Beacuse if you can clone the great minds you can also clone the bad ones. Besides if there were two or more of you in the world how wierd do you think that would make you feel?

It is highly doubtful that cloning an Einstein would result in an Einstein any more than cloning Hitler would result in another Hitler. Circumstances and situations lead to a person being who they are just as much as genetics.

And no there is nothing wrong with cloning.

I think the benefits outweigh any potential negatives. Think of the uses in cloning new body parts alone.

... this has nothing to do with my plans for a clone army though... nothing at all.

Elara : its true but, with the life span of a clone, which isnt too long anyways, what GOOD could u really do??
oh and that army thing, its ok i wont tell anyone

Well, since we have not really done much research, we do not know if that lifespan can be extended. For all we know, we could make it so they have a natural lifespan with a bit of fine-tuning in the process. Besides, if someone were to do an army (not that I am, mind you) then they would not need to live all that long, would they?

If we could perfect it, we could bring several species back from the brink of extinction. We would not be able to bring back ones that are already extinct though, unless we had several specimen samples to create a viable population... but if we could that would also be amazing. Just imagine it, passenger pigeons, breeds of tigers not seen in decades... it would be such a sight!

Cloning means that the organism that is cloned has the same DNA as the original, which means having the same DNA mistakes.

I believe that great minds and who should die and why are decided by a greater force. cloning goes against every aspect of nature, and nothing good will come of it.

I think cloning is a great idea as long as it isn't for bad things.
like takeing the clones organs to give the person it was cloned from
a longer life.

Yet another technology that humans are too morally bankrupt and irresponsible to wield.

Heh, I'll have to upgrade to...

ALL OUT DEBATE MODE!!!!

Okay, so let's start out with the creator of this thread.

coda57 : "My thoughts about cloning is, it should be left in the hands of the Gods! No mere man could, or should posses the power to create life through, unless through reproduction. I believe its crossing a line, something or someone that is dead, died for a reason and should stay that way..."

Truthfully, someone who is dead and is cloned, doesn't have the same memories or anything of the sort. They would be born a baby and it would be more or less just like reproduction expect the baby only got the genes from a single parent. About the "should stay that way", cloning is not making the world full of zombies The person is still dead, all that is created is a new baby, the adult is still dead/alive or whatnot, so I don't get what you mean by "should stay that way". Alive creatures can be cloned. If we don't have the power to create life, then what do you say of animal breeding? We are creating life... making certain animals breed to get the optimal traits. Same with cloning, the human/animal is getting all the same traits from the one person and if the process gets perfected, will live a full normal life living from a baby to an elderly adult. About the "left in the hands of the Gods", well, if you think creating life should be in the hands of good, then what about the death of animals for sport and because of the pollutant effects of industry? Should we abandon all forms of modern life?

warmaker : Exactly! The cloning of cells has so much potential that it would work to our detriment not to use this technology! Many say they wish for "the cure to cancer", what if the solution is in cloning... We shouldn't stop ourselves from exploring this route for a cure.

Baconator : Eh, well a clone would more or less be a little brother or sister. They probably won't like the same things, and their tastes and personalities will be different to yours.

Bobbynibbles : Lol, Exactly! The Clone would not have any memories. A clone of Hitler will not base their political opinions on genes, only on the environment that they were raised in.

Elara : Yes I agree with everything you said (especially about the organ cloning) , except for the part of not bringing animals back from extinction... Actually it is quite possible and there has been a specimen from an extinct animal that was cloned, called a bucardo, or a Pyrenean ibex that a clone was made and lived for a few minutes after birth. If the process was to be perfected, humankind can take back the great damage it has caused to many species by causing them to go extinct through our ways.

hoguan : Well... yeah, it'll have the same DNA mistakes, but don't we humans have DNA mistakes when we reproduce? Our cells make 1 in 100 million base pair errors through cell division, so the small errors that could possiblly be there won't affect the clone. The cells that go into making the clone are the same ones going into making a normal baby, there is little to no risk of anything happening due to DNA mistakes.

epic-san : "I believe that great minds and who should die and why are decided by a greater force. cloning goes against every aspect of nature, and nothing good will come of it".

Eh, well going against nature is a pretty groundless statement as anything can go against nature. I don't think that you knew completely what you even meant by saying that. About that nothing good will ever come through this, are you aware that cloning has already been use din the genes of plants to make them insect resistant? Are you aware of the fact that cloning within use of gene therapy has been used to treat SCID, familial hypercholesterolemia, and cystic fibrosis.

crazycatpup : Yes, actually therapeutic cloning could be used to clone organs directly, so organs will never be needed to come from a clone, if cloning is done a lot more, then as I said before therapeutic cloning can be used to clone organs.

Annette : Well, morally speaking, the things that can be done with cloning, like stopping diseases, makes this technology valuable. It depends on the people for what they are going to do in it, but if it is invented into for good causes the potentiality for this technology being used for the helping of us as human beings is tremendous. It's more irresponsible for us to not use this, because we need to help those that are in desperate need. Cancer is well-known throughout the world, the cure for cancer is known as one of those things that is desperately strived for, what does it mean if we don't find a cure, because of baseless arguments against it with no clear-cut reason of why it should not be used.


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Now for my own argument...

There has been no clear-cut arguments of why there should not be cloning. When you can't see any real reasons that not cloning will actually help us, thats when you realize that the argument is groundless. It is not too much for man to handle. Yes, there is a limit to what we should and should not do, but cloning is something already in practice that the prohibiting of this will work to our detriment in our strive to become technologically advanced in order to help our country progress and fix problems that we might encounter. There has been uses of cloning to help crops, to help with organs in humans, and to help with the curing of diseases and sicknesses. Cloning is the way to get there, we can't be afraid to do do these things. If we let religion completely rule our lives to the point of where we are afraid of science are we really helping society?
If anyone has any real concrete reason why we should not have cloning I would be happy to debate that (for fun of course )

I read about this in my human biology class. Much of each human being is Multi-factorial, meaning that many genes contribute to each aspect of us. Height is contributed to by many, many genes. Even identical twins can grow up to appear somewhat differently if these genes trigger differently. Has anyone ever seen one thin twin and one over-weight twin? Multi-factorial.

Bobbynibbles : Exactly, it's affected by many factors including outside influence. Even height we can relate to their diet, whether they drink a lot of caffeine, milk, or other contributing factors. Thinking the clone will be exactly the same is a stereotype that is definitely not true. The other stereotype is that people imagine that the clone is exactly the same age as the cloned animal/person, when the reality is that cloning is not complete duplication, the clone will grow up in an embryo and will be born.

septembern : Lol, you've got some time on your hands

However, consider this. We already have made such great strides in the fields of medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. All of these conveniences have made us live longer and thus procreate more and in the case of agriculture and manufacturing, slowly drain our natural resources. Cloning would be just another thing to enable us to live even longer. It's scary to see the population growth over just the last century:



This creates plenty of problems. With continuing technological advancements, there will be less jobs available as machines will do more and more of the labor. Let's not forget that with so many people, there will need to be more food.

The human population will keep growing exponentially until there is not enough resources to sustain them all.

NotJon : Wow lol. I was just going to say that benefits outweigh the bad, with heavy and strict government or even worldwide control, butI forgot about the part of us living longer with replaced organs, etc. Yikes and I already feel there is so many of us here.

NotJon : Lol, nice

The fact of the matter is though, that even without cloning, the population is still going at an extremely rapid pace. This means that even without cloning doing any minuscule changes to the world population, we will soon have to resort to science to figure out ways to make there enough living space for everyone.

The problem you are bringing up is that living longer is bad for the community, the truth is though, that with the advances of medicine and agriculture also come the advancement of living styles. For example in very populated cities in Japan, living quarters have been made so that everyone has enough room.

Furthermore, cloning is a pretty expensive procedure at the moment, it will take much money to go through with it, so that means that not many of the undeveloped countries will be affected. If you see your chart, you can see that most of the population spike has to do with the undeveloped countries. The truth behind the matter, is that in the countries in which the cloning will be predominant (a.k.a. developed countries) cloning will just make the developed countrymen more in number, so it is even arguable that while this will make the population grow, it will make the world population change only slightly by making the population of developed countries better. The developed countries are the ones with the most technology in order to keep the population average.

Even if cloning was not there, in the future there will already be birth limits and whatnot to keep the population from growing too big, it is simply preposterous to think that cloning will have a major affect on the complete world population as a whole. And besides, having healthy strong people in the developed countries will help society as a whole more than having sick few people in developed countries.

I see what you are trying to get at, but the fact of the matter is that cloning won't affect much as you are showing a problem which is already threatening us and we will have to take preventive measures against it. The small effect in cloning has the potential to save lives, and this cannot be compromised for the sake of a few thousand less in the population. Living longer might have detrimental effects to a society, but the society functions for the well-being of the people, so the scientific advances will have to help the society anyways with fixes to our problems. The one you brought up will be starting to be fixed in maybe a century or so, but the fact of the matter is cloning will help save many people and can be used to make better crops, to help feed a growing population.

septembern : You sir are a worthy opponent. I thought that you would bring up the developing countries estimates (which I noticed after I posted).

I can tell that you took your time researching. I didn't lol.

Japan is quite crowded and they make it work (although their population has been declining for a while now).

All in all, you countered all of my arguments quite well however why is it that you think that cloning would only prolong a few thousand more people's lives per year?

septembern : you're right, it was late at night, and I was tired. sometimes I ramble like that! i don't know WHAT I was saying...

NotJon : lol, I mostly went off of what I already knew from other debates

"however why is it that you think that cloning would only prolong a few thousand more people's lives per year?"

Actually it will prolong much more than a few thousand, but the fact of the matter is that it will save a few thousand each year. There will only be a few thousand people that can afford this that will be dying each year. The cloning will be used on much more people prolonging their lives. For instance, if someone's lungs are not too strong, but they want to continue running and they have the money, they can get a cloned lungs. They will not be necessarily being saved, but they will have a prolonged life, which again ties in to having a healthier country. The majority of the people though will still be the saved ones that are dying from a disease or another, which could be fixed with a transplant of a new organ or new cells. The crops themselves could prolong life, because with cloning they will be resistant to certain chemicals, bugs, etc.

The fact of the matter though is that cloning has much more promise than just saving lives, it can help with crops, animals, and many other advantages that add up to making cloning a great addition to the scientific arsenal against sickness and much more.


epic-san : Lol, I hear you man


To all:
Funny thing is, that when I saw this thread, I didn't know what side I would debate, I just debated the side that the least number of people were for. While I do have my personal opinion in the matter (a.k.a cloning should be used as it is already used), I don't look at my personal opinion in a debate case. When I go to competitions for Public Forum Debate, or Lincoln Douglas Debate, I debate on any side of a case, and convince the judge to follow my path, perfecting debating any side of any case (and doing it well) is what good debaters strive for.