Cloning

This is a still from "Star Wars Attack of the Clones," where an entire army of clones have been grown for combat.

Ever since we were children, our parents have always told us that everyone one of us are special and unique in our own way.  Individuality is a corner stone in the human spirit.  There is no one else, in the whole world, who is just like you.  But what happens if the individual is copied?  Can an individual be copied?  Does it cease to be an individual?  Or is there simply a second identical individual?  These are questions Science Fiction needs to answer when dealing with human cloning.  While successful human cloning is still a technology far past our present reach, there are already those for and against this issue. 

Those in favor of human cloning research tend to be those who see new scientific discoveries within this field.  They “warn that stopping human-cloning research will cut mankind off from potential advances that have not yet been imagined.”  Perhaps new cures can be found through advancements of human cloning research that can cure Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease. 

Those who oppose the idea of human cloning do so mainly on the simple basis of morality and ethics.  There is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called “The 6^th Day” in which human cloning becomes a reality.  In the movie, the government puts a ban on all human cloning known as the ‘6^th Day Law’ because God created man on the sixth day.  While the movie is more or less just an action movie, it does beg the question, does man have the right to create life?  Even if man has the ability for human replication, who is to say that these clones would have a soul?  Perhaps God is the only one who can give man a soul?

In true Science Fiction manner, movies and novels have shown us the very worse scenarios that human clones can bring about.  Picture a mad scientist who decides to take over the world with an evil army of clone soldiers.  Far-fetched right.  But what if you replace the mad scientist with a corporation; and replace soldiers with factory workers.  Do you believe it would be unrealistic in the future for a company to clone their employee of the month a hundred times and replace every factory worker with clones who don’t need to be paid and who never complain?  Is that scenario far-fetched? 

Every experience you’ve had is your own, every decision, every mistake, every success leads us who we currently are.  And because everybody chooses differently down the road of life, the result is a billion people, with a billion individual spirits.  That what makes us individuals is what makes us human.  In my opinion if you replace the individual, then you no longer have a human being.

Cloning. (2007, June 19). Issues & Controversies On File. November 3, 2010, from

Issues & Controversies database.