The Arrival of Human Cloning: It’s here. Don’t get used to it.

The cloning era began when Dolly the sheep was manufactured in 1996. Dolly was cloned via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). This is accomplished by removing the nucleus from a skin or other cell (in Dolly’s case, a mammary gland cell, hence her naming after Dolly Parton). That nucleus is then inserted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed. The engineered egg is stimulated, and if the cloning works, an embryo comes into being through asexual reproduction. Once that happens, the cloning is complete.

Human cloning has been even more technically challenging. But an international group of scientists announced in the June 6 Cell—a prominent, peer-reviewed scientific journal—that they created scores of cloned human embryos, developing four of them in a dish for about 10 days to the blastocyst stage (about 150-200 cells). This is the stage at which embryos created in vitro are usually implanted if they are to be gestated to birth. However, that was not the purpose of the recent experiments. Instead, the cloned embryos were destroyed and embryonic stem cell lines created—a process sometimes called “therapeutic cloning.” While these scientists have no interest in reproductive cloning, if a cloned baby is ever born, their experiments will have been a big step toward making it possible.

The successful cloning of human beings—whether for research or birth—is momentous: Even if the technique is used only in pursuit of biological knowledge and medical treatments, those will come at the very high ethical price of manufacturing human life for the purpose of harvesting it like a corn crop—that is, for the purpose of destroying it. 

Cloning, moreover, is essential to foreseeable endeavors such as the genetic engineering of embryos, the creation of human/animal chimeras, the gestation of cloned fetuses in artificial wombs as a means of obtaining patient-compatible organs, and eventually the birth of cloned babies.

SCNT requires one egg for each attempt at cloning, but human eggs for use in research are in short supply. So the biotech industry is seeking legal authorization to pay women for their eggs. The harvesting of eggs, however, can harm the supplier. The potential side effects include infection, loss of fertility, stroke, and in rare cases death.

The recent Cell paper paid a great deal of attention to the egg issue. Apparently, not just any eggs can be used if cloning is to be successful. “SCNT reprogramming is dependent on human oocyte [egg] quality,” the authors write. Indeed, most of the eggs the researchers used provided poor embryos, but the four highest-quality cloned embryos—those from which embryonic stem cells were derived—all grew from eggs supplied by the same donor.

Yikes. Not only will cloning encourage treating women’s reproductive assets as marketable commodities, but a concentrated search may soon be on for women who can produce prime cloning-quality eggs—furthering the objectification of female biological functions. Expect an additional political conflagration over legal efforts to protect women from being exploited by the biotechnology industry....it is also an ethical earthquake. Because these experiments offer the potential to advance scientific knowledge, they will tempt us—always for “the best” reasons—to set aside our convictions about the intrinsic dignity of all human life.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/arrival-human-cloning_724721.html#