hello and welcome back to life's biggest
questions my name is Charlotte dobre and
today we're going to try to answer the
question is human cloning possible human
cloning is a very controversial idea
purely for the fact that the process is
seen as unethical many of these views
have religious origins and come down to
the fundamental idea that the practice
of human cloning is the practice of
playing God these needs have prevented
the practice of cloning a human in the
Year 2015 around 70 countries had banned
human cloning so how do we know if human
cloning is possible if it's next to
impossible to test that's exactly what
we are going to talk about right now on
life's biggest question let's start
things off with a bit of backstory human
cloning is the creation of a genetically
identical copy of a human or an
artificial human the process involves
reproducing human cells and tissue
researchers successfully cloned a frog
in the 1950s but the process of human
cloning has been a heated topic of
debate since the 1960s Joshua Lederberg
an advocate for human cloning and
genetic engineering published an article
in the American Naturalist in 1966 and
again in the Washington Post in 1967
this article caused a heated debate
between letter Berg a Nobel
prize-winning geneticist
and leon kass a conservative
bioethicists leon kass at the time
believed that program reproduction of
men will in fact to humanize him a chief
named Dolly was successfully cloned in
1996 by somatic cell nuclear transfer
making it the first mammal to be
successfully cloned after this happened
it was only natural to the idea of human
cloning to be discussed several nations
made process of human cloning illegal
when at the same time scientists were
promising to successfully create a human
clone in the next few years since the
1950s researchers have been able to
clone mice cat
ghost rabbits sheep pigs and cows
however with each of these cases there
were problems cloning a mouse including
a human are two very different things
but the first step in that direction
would be to clone a primate researchers
had infinite examples for Mike to work
with but the process of attaining a
primate egg so the purpose of cloning is
difficult such samples are hard to come
by and when
cappen attained efforts to clone
primates have failed cloning a mouse
involves taking the nucleus of an egg
and inserting it into another when this
is being done proteins that are
necessary to help cells divide are also
removed for mice this is not a problem
because the embryo is able to make those
proteins again but primates are not able
to do this this could be attributed to
why efforts to clone a primate have
failed in addition to that problem
cloning animals also resulted in those
animals having genetic abnormalities
this is because the clone only has one
parent instead of two these
abnormalities would result in embryos
not getting implanted inside a uterus
and occasionally the fetus would abort
without warning or the animal would die
shortly after being born because of the
extremely high rate of death and the
developmental abnormalities the process
of human cloning is seen as unethical
despite all of this the benefits of
human cloning if successful would be
substantial
stem cell therapy for example is the use
of stem cells to treat or prevent a
disease or condition regenerative
medicine could be used to create organs
for transplantation those artificial
organs would reduce the risk of organ
transplant rejection by the recipients
body because they were created using
their own genetic materials rather than
the genetic material of a donor the
regenerative medicine is not currently
in clinical use but it's heavily
researched for its potential as it
stands right now only one type of stem
cell therapy bone marrow transplantation
is in clinical use object stands right
now no record of a human clone exists
even though it may be possible it's
unlikely that it will ever happen
because of the ethical implications the
death rate of cloning is so high only
one in every 100 attempts result in a
living animal and when those animals do
successfully survive they experience for
health on an international level human
cloning is not allowed the United
Nations General Assembly banned all
forms of human cloning in 2005 as it
stands right now only ten states in
America allow human embryos to be
created but ban the embryo from maturing
fully a Chinese company named boyalife
group
claims to have technology to clone human
and it's currently building a massive
animal cloning facility but they have
restrained from the practice of cloning
humans because they fear public backlash
advocate and there is no reason
beneficial enough to change the public
outlook toward human cloning boyalife
plans to use the facility for the
purpose of cloning animal commercially
for livestock or pets so is human
cloning possible theoretically yes it is
but to this day no records of a fully
developed human clone exist even though
it may be possible it is unlikely that
it will ever happen because of the
ethical implications do you think human
cloning should be allowed write your
responses in the comment section down
below I'm Charlotte dobre for life's
biggest questions we hope you enjoyed
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