Biology

Project Report
On

“Cloning”
Session: 2023-24”

Submitted to:- Submitted by

Ms. Avinash Kaur Pranjal Lather

Lecturer in Biology Roll No.
Class XII (Medical)

Sahara Comprehensive
School,
 Kurukshetra
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I take this opportunity to thank and express my sincere gratitude to

Ms. Avinash Kaur, Lecturer in Biology who guided me for this project and

without whose efforts; this project would not have been completed. I put my

sincere efforts to make this project interesting. I fully consulted all the available

hooks on this subject and I am thankful to esteemed authors. I also want to mention

the Biology Laboratory Assistant who also helped me a lot.

In the end, I am thankful to all those who took interest in the successful

completion of the project.

Pranjal Lather
XII (Medical)
RollNo.
 CERTIFICATE

Certified that the investigatory project entitled “CLONING” was carried out

in Biology by Pranjal Lather, a student of XII (Medical), Sahara Comprehensive

School, Kurukshetra as a partial fulfillment of the practical work conducted by the

Board of Secondary Education, New Delhi.

Ms. Avinash Kaur

Lecturer in Biology,
 CLONING
1. Introduction To Cloning And Stem Cell Issues
2. Should We Clone Humans?
2.1 Human Cloning - will it ever happen?
2.2 Why Cloning Humans is Ethically Unacceptable
2.2.1 Controlling Someone Else’s Genetic Makeup
2.2.2 Instrumentality
2.2.3 Infertility - an Exception to Instrumentality
2.2.4 Psychological Effects - Identity and Relationship
2.2.5 Physical Risk
2.2.6 Social Risk
3. Non-Reproductive Cloning?
4. What do you do with a Genie out of the Bottle?
 Introduction to Cloning and Stem Cell Issues

Cloning: Dolly was the most famous sheep in the world. She looked much
like any other sheep, but she was been cloned from another adult sheep. Inside
every cell, her genetic make up was the same as a ewe of a different generation.
Scientists at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh rewrote the laws of biology, which
has become the focus of an unprecedented media circus asa result. And, if you
believe some of the press hype, for opening a Pandora’s box of consequences with
some very disturbing ethical and social implications. But are we just getting
steamed up about science fantasies, or is there really something we should rightly
be worried about? And what is all this research really for? stem cells: In 1998,
American scientists extracted stem cells from human embryos and have been able
to keep them in “cell lines” which can in principle be converted into any type of
body cell. The claim is this could result in revolutionary therapies for degenerative
diseases which are otherwise untreatable. It would take many years to establish
whether the scientific dream really would become a threapeutic reality, but it also
has a serious and fundamental ethical questions about the nature and moral status
of the human embryo and research with embryos.
 SHOULD WE CLONE HUMANS?

1. Human Cloning - will it ever happen?

One of the abiding SciFi nightmares has been the idea that we could one day
replicate human beings asexually, just by copying material from human cells. This
was one of the most chilling features of Huxley’s Brave New World. More
measured scientific assessments have generally regarded this as something pretty
remote. And many in the churhces and elsewhere hoped it would stay that way.
Roslin’s scientists have told a Select Comittee of the House of Commons that the
nuclear transfer technique they have applied to produce Dolly could be in theory
applied to humans. Whether anyone would try and whether it would work is
another matter. But the “what if’ question must now be asked with much more
seriousness than would have ever been justified before.
Two aspects of the Roslin discovery have set the world of Biology alight. One is
the fact that an somatic tissue from an adult has been used to produce a live animal.
This has rewritten one of the laws of biology. Up to now it had been assumed that
once animal cells go through the mysterious process of differentiation, and become
a particular type of cell, they cannot go back to being undifferentiated. Now
DrWilmut’s work has caused a set of cells to forget what they are and start all over
again, as if they were undifferentiatied. The second is that you can clone a large
mammal from the cells of an adult of the species. It is this second aspect that has
caught the public imagination, because it has dramatically brought forward the
question of whether it could be possible to realising the SciFi dreams of cloned
humans.
Faced with such a fertile prospect, the human imagination runs lot, and the media
have come up with some very bizarre ideas. One article claimed that we might
clone humans to select out genetic defects or select for desirable traits. This would
be impossible just by cloning. It might in theory be done by germlinegnee therapy
but that is quite another, and highly controversial, story. The announcements that
nuclear transfer cloning is possible not only in sheep but cattle and mice suggests
that the technique could be quite general in mammals, and thus potentially more
likely in humans than when it had been done only on a single sheep.
Scientifically this would be a big and highly dangerous leap to go from a cloning a
sheep to cloning humans, and it is premature to discuss this as if it were inevitably
going to happen. But this discovery means that we have at least got to ask the
question, “What if?”.

2. Why Cloning Humans is Ethically Unacceptable

DrWilmut, the scientist involved, and his colleagues at Roslin have made it quite
clear that they think that to clone humans would be unethical. The Human
Fretilisation and Embryology Authroityagrees with the general public impression
that to clone human beings would be ethically unacceptable as a matter of
principle. I and most people in the Church of Scotland would certainly agree that
on principle, to replicate any human technologically is something which goes
against the basic dignity of the uniqueness of each human being in God’s sight.
Christians would see this as a violation of the uniqueness of a human life, which
God has given to each of us and to no one else. In what sesne do we mean this?
Some say that that the existence of Identical” twins means that we should have no
ethical difficulty over cloning, or that to object to cloning implies that twins are
abnormal. This argument does not hold. Biologically, identical human twins are
not the norm, but the unusual manner of their creation does not make them any less
human. We recognise that each is a uniquely valuable individual. There are two
fundamental differences between cloning and twinning, however. Twinning is a
random, unpredictable event, involving the duplicating of a genetic composition
which has never existed before and which at that point is unknown. Cloning would
choose the genetic composition of some person and make another individual with
the same genes. It is an intentional, controlled action to produce a specific known
end. In terms of ethics, choosing to clone from a known individual, and the
unpredictable creation in the womb of twins of unknown genetic nature belong to
categories as different as accidental death is to murder. The mere existence of
“identical’ twins cannot be cited to justify the practice of cloning.

Controlling Someone Else’s Genetic Makeup

Thus it is not the genetic identity that is the crucial point but the human act of
control and it is this element of control which provides the fundamental ethical
case against human cloning. The biblical picture of humanity implies that we are
far more than just our genes, or even our genes plus environmental influences,
there is also our spiritual dimension made in Gods image, constituting a holistic
notion of being, in which the relational element is as important as the individual.
To be a person is to be in relationship. Hence it is vital that the relational
implications of technology are considered alongside the ontological. It is against
this picture that most Christians would see it ethically unacceptable to clone human
beings as a matter of principle. In so far as genes are a fundamental part of our
make up, to choose to replicate the genetic part of human make up technologically
is a violation of a vital aspect of the basic dignity and uniqueness of each human.
By definition, to clone is to exercise unprecedented control over the genetic
dimension of another individual. This is quite different from the control parents
exert in bringing up our children. Whatever the parents do or do not do, it is
inevitable that they have a profound effect on their children. No one exerts the
level of control involved in preselecting a child’s entire genetic make up except by
a very deliberate act. Moreover, a child can reject any aspect of its upbringing, but
it could never reject the genes that were chosen forit. Such control by one human
over another is incompatible with the ethical notion of human freedom, in the
sense of that each individual’s genetic identity should be inherently unpredictable
and unplanned.

Instrumentality
Cloning raises a number of concerns arising from its consequences, of which
instrumentality and risk are of especial importance. To replicate any human being
technologically is a fundamentally instrumental act towards two unique individuals
the one from whom the clone is taken and the clone itself In nearly all the
speculative ideas for cloning a human would use the clone as a means towards
someone else’s end. They would be created as clones for the primary benefit not of
the individuals themselves but of some third party. This would be the case for
cloning a dying child or parent to help those bereaved cope with the loss, or
cloning an infant with a predisposition to leukaernia, as a source of bone marrow
which would suffer less tissue rejection problems. These violate a basic ethical
principle, that of create another human being other than primarily for their own
sake. There is an important distinction in Christian theology, which admits an
instrumental role for animals, to a limited degree, but prohibits it in humans. To
clone a child with leukaemia to provide compatible bone marrow would treat the
cloned sibling to that extent as means to an end, for the benefit of a third party,
rather than for their own sake, and without their consent. Dorothy Werth cited the
controversial US case where this was done through normal reproduction, but I
would question whether the fact that it worked is justification enough. Again, it is
rightly said that we have mixed motives for why we want children, but that does
not justify treating a child as a means to an end.

Infertility - an Exception to Instrumentality

An exception to this objection would be the idea of producing a child from an
infertile couple by cloning one of them. But this raises other problems. Instead of
being the unique genetic product of both parents, the child is a copy of one of
them. For many Christians this would be a denial of a basic relational aspect of
reproduction, just as in the case of surrogacy. For an infertile couple to have a child
by cloning one of them would not normally be thought of as an instrumental act,
and might at first sight sound like a compassionate option to offer to childless
couples. As observed above, however, there could be serious ethical problems,
notwithstanding the anguish which childlessness brings to many couples. It would
not be the biological child of both parents in the normal sense. For many this might
be seen as taking the technological harnessing of the desire for a child one step too
far, a means which is not justified by the end. The tendency is becoming to demand
parenthood as my right, as though it were some moral absolute. We are losing the
Christian understanding of children are a gift, not a right which we can presume
that God or life should give us on demand.

Psychological Effects - Identity and Relationship

There are a number of reasons why human cloning might be ruled out for the
psychological dangers involved. No one knows what would be the effects on
human identity and relationships of creating someone who is the twin of their
father or mother, but born in a different generation and environment. Would the
clone feel that he or she was just a copy of someone else who’s already existed and
not really themselves? Am I really someone else but put into a different womb?
What will be my relationship to the one I was cloned from? No one can predict
with any degree of assurance what the response would be. Presumably they would
vary from person to person. I suggest there sufficient dangers for applying the
precautionary principle should apply. In other words, even though one could not be
sure how many people would suffer in this way, it would be wrong knowingly to
inflict that risk on someone. Whose interests are being put first?

Physical Risk
Dolly took 277 attempts and nearly 30 failed pregnancies to get one success. To
repeat the same thing on humans would be giving both the mother and the potential
foetus an unacceptably high risk of damage. The basic science of fusing the
cytoplasm and nucleus and reactivating the cell is very poorly understood. How
many abnormal babies would have to be produced to get one right? There are
sufficient unknowns about physical problems in pregnancy with cloned sheep and
cattle to suggest that human cloning experiments would violate normal medical
practice. Roslin researchers have said that there is no experiment that could be
done to prove the safety of human clonig without casuing serious risk to humans in
the process. Then there are also unknown factors of ageing. How old is Dolly? Is
she her age since her birth, or her age since birth plus the age of the tissue from
which she was taken? No one knows what the effect of nuclear transfer on ageing
processes.
Social Risk
Finally, human cloning would bring grave risks of abuses to human dignity and
exploitation by unscrupulous people. We have already seen examples of people
offering cloning services for large sums of money, when there is currently no
reasonable prospect of delivery, and apparently regardless of the risks involved or,
in the case of Richard Seed, the rule of law. It is also an open door for abuse, in the
way that another individual, a group in society or even the state could exert undue
control over an individual. if anyone ever did unfortunately clone humans, it is
important to counter the suggestion from science fiction that they would be
subhuman androids with human bodies but no souls. More seriously, some papers
from an Islamic perspective seem to imply that if reproduction is ‘by human
artifice, it lacks the spiritual element. - Some Christians think the same. I do not,
however, see any grounds that a cloned child would be any less human than
another child. Why would God fail to make the child fully “in His image” just
because the manner of conception? There would need to be considerable
safeguards to avoid the risk of stigmatisation. It would be foolish to imagine that
abuses could not occur.

3 Non-Reproductive Cloning?
The announcement of mouse cloning opens tip a whole field of research into
other applications of cloning technology which would stop short of full human
beings or animals. What applications are envisaged? At present all is speculative,
but some of the implications could well be ethically contentious.
Two pieces of research announced in fate 1998 suggest that, after many years of
trying, scientists appear to have been able to “redirect” human embryos from their
normal course of forming a complete person to becoming only certain types of
body cells. Using special cells, known as stem cells, cells of, say bone marrow or
different tissues, could be produce more or less indefinitely in the laboratory. In
theory, this would open up immense potential for treatments of degenerative
diseases where fresh cells could be injected into the patient, in that way that, for
example, foetal brain cells have been used on some Parkinson’s disease sufferers
(currently with uncertain results). One problem with this is rejection by the body,
but if the embryo were cloned from cells taken from one’s own body, would it be
possible to overcome the rejection? No one knows whether any of this can be done
successfully and safely.
At the moment it is speclation, but it is seen as important enough to need to know
what are the ethical implications of such developments, were they to be possible.
During 1998, the UK Human Embryology Authority and Human Genetics
Advisory Commission ran a limited public consultation on medical uses of cloning
technology, both reproductive and non-reproductive (albeit that these most recent
research findings came too late for public comments to be submitted. The joint
report “Cloning Issues in Reproduction, Science and Medicine” in December 1998
proposed that the UKregulations should now be amended to allow research into
cloning embryos for cell replacement and another non- reproductive application
involving mitochondrial disease.
SRT’s reaction to this proposal and the ethical dilemmas it poses is given in more
detail in Cloning Human Embryos for Spare Tissue – an Ethical Dialemma. While
we welcome thereport’s clear conclusion against the reproductive cloning of
human beings, but we express deep concern about proposals to clone human
embryos which would be used not for reproduction but as a source of replacement
tissues. We also call for a much wider public debate of this issue before the UK
amends the regulations to allow this controversial new development.
Some have speculated whether it would be possible on the basis of these
discoveries could be the ability to grow not an entire human being, but living
organs from cells. Experts at the Roslin Institute and a number of other authorities
see this as very unlikely to be possible in most cases. There would be many
immense practical questions to answer, and it would be naive to assume that just
because we think it, science will one day find a way to do it, This would also raise
a number of senous problems ethcally It could be almost s controversial as human
cloning. This was brought into focus by the announcement in October 1998 of
work in which headless frog embryos were produced by reprogramming cloned
cells. This was extrapolated, rather over- sensationally, by the researcher to the
possibility of creating separate human organs surrounded by sacks of skin, grown
as it were in a test tune from reprogrammed, cloned cells. This was also reported
briefly during an excellent BBC TV Horizon documentary on cloning. Aside from
the technical questions begged by this extrapolation, there is a serious question
about whether it would be ethically acceptable tocreate organs as separate entities
from human tissue. This needs careful thought, rather than knee jerk reactions, but
at first sight this would probably be unacceptable to many people. And this may be
only a thought experiment, albeit a dangerous one, since to be of any use, one
would have to have such an organ already existing at the same age and stage of
development as the patient requiring one. Would this be possible without having a
substitute organ already growing from the time of ones birth?
Even this could be overcome, it could be argued that this was only justified in
extremis and only for the benefit of the individual involved, or, with appropriate
informed consent, a close relative. And underneath this partial cloning, lies the
ethical problem known as “gradualism”. By a progression of small steps you could
eventually provide all the conditions needed to clone the entire human being, even
though that had never been the intention of the research. This raises a much deeper
question about how the direction of research is determined and controlled.