FREE ESSAY ON CLONING

CLONING

Brian Rowan
Writing II
21 February 2001
CLONING
Cloning has been a very controversial issue in the United States over the past few years.
There are two different sides, either one is for the process of cloning or they're not.
It's that simple. Strictly speaking, a clone refers to one or more offspring derived from
a single ancestor, whose genetic composition is identical to that of the ancestor. No sex
is involved in the production of clones, and since sex is the normal means by which new
genetic material is introduced during procreation, clones have no choice but to have the
same genes as their single parent. The first successful clone was accomplished about two
years ago, although not a human clone. "Dolly" was her name, and she was a sheep. This
controversial issue has been studied and examined by many great people, including two men
by the names of Laurence Tribe and Charles Krauthammer, whose essays will be examined in
this paper. In "Second Thoughts on Cloning", written by Laurence Tribe, a much stronger,
opposing viewpoint is conveyed than that of Charles Krauthammer's "Of Headless Mice...and
Men".
Charles Krauthammer is a medical doctor and a licensed psychiatrist, but he is chiefly
known as a writer. The article that will be examined in this paper was originally
published in TIME magazine on January 19, 1998. In this particular article, Krauthammer
shares his view against the act of cloning. In the beginning of his article, he talks
about the cloning of headless mice that took place in a laboratory in Texas. He feels
that this is meaningless and that does not accomplish anything; yet it really does.
Krauthammer talks about the mice used in the University of Texas experiments; "For sheer
Frankenstein wattage, the purposeful creation of these animal monsters has no
equal"(Krauthammer 469). Scientists are figuring out how to breed these headless
creatures and they learn from them. Eventually, humans will be next. "Lewis Wolpert,
professor of biology at University College, London, finds producing headless humans
'personally distasteful' but, given the shortage of organs, does not think distaste is
sufficient reason not to go ahead with something that would save lives"(Krauthammer 470).
However, Krauthammer does not agree with Wolpert. "Clinton has banned federal funding of
human-cloning research, of which there is none anyway. He then proposed a five-year ban
on cloning. This is not enough. Congress should ban human cloning now. Totally. And
regarding one particular form, it should be draconian: The deliberate creation of
headless humans must be made a crime, indeed a capital crime. If we flinch in the face of
this high-tech barbarity, we'll deserve to live in the hell it heralds"(Krauthammer
470).
Laurence H. Tribe, a professor teaching constitutional law at Harvard, printed an article
in the New York Times on December 5, 1997 in support of cloning. He wrote about the early
controversies that were connected with cloning; "But others saw a nightmarish and
decidedly unnatural perversion of human reproduction. California enacted a ban on human
cloning, and the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission recommended making
the ban nationwide"(Tribe 460). Tribe later goes on to say, "The initial debate has
cooled, however, and many in the scientific field now seem to be wondering what all the
fuss was about"(Tribe 460). Tribe points out that, "Just as was true of bans on abortion
and on sex outside marriage, bans on human cloning are bound to be hard to enforce. And
that, in turn, requires us to think in terms of a class of potential outcasts-people
whose very existence society will have chosen to label as a misfortune and, in essence,
to condemn"(Tribe 460). He believes in the notion that it is unnatural and intrinsically
wrong to sever the conventional links between heterosexual unions sanctified by tradition
and the creation and upbringing of new life. Overall, Tribe makes a significant amount of
arguments that really helps one to start believing in cloning. "From the perspective of
the wider community, straight no less than gay, a society that bans acts of human
creation for no better reason than that their particular form defies nature and tradition
is a society that risks cutting itself off from vital experimentation, thus losing a
significant part of its capacity to grow. If human cloning is to be banned, then, the
reasons had better be far more compelling than any thus far advanced"(Tribe 461).