• Question: how do you feel about cloning?

    Asked by sussim24 to Alexandra, Dean, Jess, Luisa, Sian on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sian Foch-Gatrell

      Sian Foch-Gatrell answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Depends to what extent. Scientists use bacterial clones all the time. Not so sure about cloning whole organisms especially humans.

    • Photo: Dean Whittaker

      Dean Whittaker answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      That depends. Nature clones all the time – bacteria reproduce by cloning, twins are clones. Human cloning can help us harvest stem cells, useful for growing any tissues we want to help the person you clone. When you clone a person, you only let a sack of cells grow so far before you stop it growing – it isn’t a person. You might say this is playing god. But medicines are playing God from that perspective (we’re altering our bodies in an un-natural way). The way we grow crops (selective breeding) is also playing with genetics. So much like my stance on Genetic modification, I think it’s fine as long as there are rules in place to stop it going too far. In principle, it could help a lot of people.

    • Photo: Luisa Ostertag

      Luisa Ostertag answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      It’s neccessary and gets done in labs every day (mainly on bacteria).
      For humans and even for mammals I don’t think we should do it.

    • Photo: Jessica Housden

      Jessica Housden answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I think that we should use scientific advances to help ourselves, and help cure horrible diseases. However, that is where my support ends – I don’t want to see cloned people or animals. At the moment there are lots of problems still with animals that have been cloned, but these could be solved. But I don’t think ethically we should be cloning ‘full’ people, only a few cells. Unfortunately though, I don’t know a great deal about it.

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