Clone this!

By David Greenspan

(U-WIRE) SEATTLE (U. Washington) - So it turns out that playing god is not as easy as we thought. Cloning healthy animals has turned out to be nearly impossible with current technology, according to recent scientific studies. More specifically, no more than 3 percent of all attempts at cloning animals have been successful. If we can't even make a healthy cow, maybe we should rethink the idea of making healthy people.

Successfully reconstructing the intricate strands of DNA that constitute our very molecular framework would be a marvel indeed. Of course, not everyone is particularly keen on the idea of "making" people to begin with. Moral implications aside, however, should we do it?

In light of this recent information, the idea becomes a little less enthralling. According to a Reuters article, "Animal clones that have been produced often have severe problems such as developmental delays, heart defects and malfunctioning immune systems."

If you were to ask my mother, she'd tell you there are plenty of humans that were naturally produced who have these same problems already. It just doesn't seem logical to unnaturally produce even more.

Does this necessarily mean we should abandon cloning altogether? I don't think so.

Societally, humans have learned to breed animals for their own benefits, and the idea of harvesting organs is like a dream for many transplant patients. Still, it doesn't take a whole human to make a single organ.

Luckily, even though we can't throw together a complete organism with much success, we've already proven that we can produce individual organs through various cloning techniques.

Being able to create a working heart, liver, lung or whatever you can imagine (be creative folks) from just a little snippet of cellular matter sounds like something out of a grocery store sci-fi novel of the week. However, when you consider that even Jean-Luc Picard only had a plastic heart, it makes the idea downright impressive. It would be surpassing, in a sense, the technology we see on Star Trek.

We know how to genetically alter cattle, chickens, bacteria and many other living organisms. Even though humans are not far away, they remain a mystery.

If that mystery were solved, we would open up a whole new world of conflicts and moral entanglements. We already get up in arms over the copying of other people's intellectual properties. Just look at Napster. Pretty soon (and actually, it's already happened at least once) we'll have people filing copyrights on their own DNA.

Even if it were OK, though, is it something we really want to do? If we have problems cloning healthy sheep (which are genetically less complicated than us Homo sapiens) we're probably looking straight in the face of a multi-billion dollar disappointment. No sequels in the near future, I'm afraid. Even if we put together a working human, what are we going to do with its malfunctioning heart and immune system?

We ought to concentrate on perfecting our systems of organ reproduction, rather than human reproduction. Sex will more than take care of the latter, I assure you. Plus, if organs are cloned individually, we don't have to worry about all the sticky morality mess of taking working parts from an artificial person.

Also, if it becomes possible to create organs from a given individual's own tissue, we eliminate the potential hazard of tissue rejection, which is common in transplant cases. Waiting lists would be eliminated as well.

It would be redundant to create a system of producing less-than-healthy humans, seeing as we already have an extremely efficient method in place. If the purpose of cloning is to better humanity, we ought to stick to just the important pieces, and not the whole shebang.