The ethical implications of human clones have been much alluded to, but have seldom been examined with any rigour. This paper examines the possible uses and abuses of human cloning and draws out the principal ethical dimensions, both of what might be done and its meaning. The paper examines some of the major public and official responses to cloning by authorities such as President Clinton, the World Health Organisation, the European parliament, UNESCO, and others and reveals their inadequacies as foundations (...) for a coherent public policy on human cloning. The paper ends by defending a conception of reproductive rights of "procreative autonomy" which shows human cloning to be not inconsistent with human rights and dignity. (shrink)

The possibility of human cloning first surfaced in the 1960s, stimulated by the report that a salamander had been cloned. James D. Watson and Joshua Lederberg, distinguished Nobel laureates, speculated that the cloning of human beings might one day be within reach; it was only a matter of time. Bioethics was still at that point in its infancybioethicsand cloning immediately caught the eye of a number of those beginning to write in the field. They included Paul Ramsey, Hans Jonas, and (...) Leon Kass. Cloning became one of the symbolic issues of what was, at that time, called a biology that would be dominated by molecular genetics. Over a period of five years or so in the early 1970s a number of articles and book chapters on the ethical issues appeared, discussing cloning in its own right and cloning as a token of the radical genetic possibilities. (shrink)

On Sunday morning, 23 February 1997, the world awoke to a technological advance that shook the foundations of biology and philosophy. On that day, we were introduced to Dolly, a 6-month-old lamb that had been cloned directly from a single cell taken from the breast tissue of an adult donor. Perhaps more astonished by this accomplishment than any of their neighbors were the scientists who actually worked in the field of mammalian genetics and embryology. Outside the lab where the cloning (...) had actually taken place, most of us thought it could never happen. Oh, we would say that perhaps at some point in the distant future, cloning might become feasible through the use of sophisticated biotechnologies far beyond those available to us now. But what many of us really believed, deep in our hearts, was that this was one biological feat we could never master. New lifemust have its origins in an embryo formed through the merger of gametes from a mother and father. It was impossible, we thought, for a cell from an adult mammal to become reprogrammed, to start all over again, to generate another entire animal or person in the image of the one born earlier. (shrink)

In 1993, investigators from George Washington University Medical Center separated the cells of 17 human embryos and produced 48 embryos, an average of three embryos for each original. The method, variously called twinning, cloning, embryo splitting, and blastomere separation, demonstrated that human embryos could be split to create genetically identical entities during conception. When publicized, however, the experiment brought to mind a different view of cloning repeated since the beginning of the new reproductive technologies. In the early 1970s, when research (...) on in vitro fertilization was in its infancy, commentators worried that cloning–defined as the duplication of persons–would be next, leading to a scenario of “boys genetically exactly like the father, girls like the mother, or individuals like some true or false hero of art, science, or sports, or like some demagogue or some saint.”. (shrink)