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opinion:
our view
Make mine blond
At a scientific forum
held in Rome this weekend, a team of scientists announced to
the world that they would be able to clone humans within two
years.
Since the group
is a multinational collective using private funding in independent
laboratories, they are not regulated by any government or
beholden to any countries' citizens whose taxes provide their
funding.
This means all
the hand-wringing politicians we will hear from about the
ethics and morality of cloning will be pointless as no one
body will have direct jurisdiction.
The team announced
it has received thousands of positive e-mails from infertile
couples who want help from doctors in having children.
Most in the audience
at the forum were protestors and scientists opposed to group's
intentions, both on moral and scientific grounds.
Since by definition
a clone is a duplication of a living being, how exactly are
the scientists going to work with infertile couples to produce
a child? Mix in a little of mom and a little of dad to create
the perfect uber-child?
Not exactly as
the couple would have to pick which parent to duplicate, or
find some other DNA, from a willing or unwilling source. With
sperm banks and egg donation services, the possibility for
designing a perfect child are practically here.
Imagine the temptation
of snatching a hair sample from a celebrity or superstar athlete
when the doctor asks for sample DNA to create your new child.
People have more
scruples than that, right?
If scientists start
creating offspring by cloning infertile parents, won't they
create infertile offspring who will then need to clone to
reproduce, diminishing the quality with each generation?
Rather than adopt
an already living and unwanted child in this overpopulated
world, selfish and vain people will pay whatever price to
these greedy scientists to create progeny.
Whether looking
at the situation scientifically or morally, creating new life
for infertile couples is not right.
Nature is an impartial
arbiter which selects species that will survive and which
members of those species will reproduce. Only the strong survive
and only they should pass down their genes to the next generation,
be it elks or humans.
Morally, scientists
are playing God by creating life from where it does not exist.
God did not create in vitro fertilization and cloning to give
children to barren couples. God made them infertile in the
first place.
Science made the
advance to get around God and nature.
Eventually once
the complete map of the human genome is available couples
will be able to fine tune and select the traits they want
their offspring to possess. Soon science will have one-stop
shopping with checklists of traits people can request in their
children.
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