Cloning of Human Beings | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.

Cloning of Human Beings

Scheme of the essay

Exposition: Cloning humans is raising a lot of problematic questions – both legal and philosophical

Rising Action: Society may find it hard to adjust to cloning.

Climax:

(1) Everyone will become a soft target for kidnappers

(2) Cloning cannot produce anything closer to original

(3) Something will be preserved for cloning

(4) Cloning will shrink the market for new entrants.

Ending: Cloning will copy an organism and most a person.

If you have whole teams made out of Rud Gullet cell- line, does soccer remain a competitive sport? If Mani Shankar Aiyar can be persuaded to part with a tissue sample, will the civil services examination be a foregone conclusion? If Harshad Mehta puts his bone marrow up for sale, will Dalal Street boom or crash? The possibility of cloning humans is raising a lot of problematic questions, ranging from the legal to the purely philosophical. But we should be interested in far more basic issues; is anyone cloning Alicia Silverstone, and where do I book my copy? Is Mattel taking orders yet?

Sadly, we might have to go without our personal Silverstone because cloning humans will have implications that society might find hard to adjust to for instance, the American public is now much taken up with an aspect of cloning that is truly transatlantic in its creativity. It appears that kidnappers will no longer have to spirit away our near and dear ones. They can merely rip a couple of hairs off our heads in passing, culture the roots, clone us and hold the copies to ransom a few years on. Everyone is a soft target.

Cloning has long been a preoccupation with science fiction writers, a species that seems to have perfected the gift of prophecy. Two decades ago, Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain, about a mutated virus. Ten years later, there was the AIDS pandemic. A decade later, when Dolly was still just a bright idea on the Roslin campus, Crichton came out with Jurassic Park. So, can we now look forward to dino reserves?

Quite possible, Dinosaur DNA is rather well-preserved in amber. There isn’t much harm in letting Disney run Jurassic parks either. If anyone gets hurt, it’ll be the lizards themselves. They might find contemporary levels of pollution hard to take. Of course, the veterinary bills could play havoc with Disney bottom-line.

But human cloning is a much different from that of worms. It would effect changes in the way we look at life, in the way we deal with death, and the idea of individuality that is the basis of our legal, social and political systems. Cloning would let man achieve his most compelling fantasy: that of immortality.

The catch, however, is that the reality would be a poor cousin of the fantasy. Despite the mysticism that cloning has come to be invested with, it can produce nothing closer to the original than an identical twin, something as old as reproduction itself. There is no way to invest a copy with the life experiences of the original, which condition personality. Science may have got around to controlling nature, but nurture is still very much a free agent. There is only meagre reason to believe that memories are encoded in genetic material. What this implies is that there is no way to guarantee that the clone of a Nobel laureate will be Nobel worthy. Or that a copy of Jonny Rotten will not feel impelled to play Mendelssohn.

However, that should not prevent the enterprising from trying their luck. There is some premium biological material out there. The brains of two notable men of science, Einstein and Broca, are there for the picking, pickled in preservative solutions. Some root canal work on the teeth of the Buddha should yield a decent haul of usable cell nuclei. Tutankhamen can be raised from the dead and allowed to grow into a disappointingly short man. Europe’s Ice Man, who was frozen in a glacier during the last ice Age, can be cloned to finally assure as that making has not made significantly great strides since the dawn of civilisation. Besides, some state-of-the-art grave digging could unearth enough material to clone the besides. greatest statemen and thinkers of all time, and Ava Gardner

It is another matter, of course, that the Ice Man’s clone might eventually join the faculty at Cornell. Or that Tutankhamen’s might turn out to be a painfully shy and retiring soul. Or that Einstein’s might be doomed to the life of an unsuccessful auditor. Gene expression is not an entirely predictable matter in the finer details, where God still enjoys a decisive say, and there is always nurture to condition the process of development. The same grey areas account for the differences exhibited by ‘identical’ twins.

With such poor predictability, cloning will not be a particularly attractive proposition for anyone except movie producers, who put a premium on physically identical. Doubles play a crucial role in contemporary movie making, so crucial that the market is expected to be taken over the machines, which tend to be more reliable and cost-effective than people. The Star Wars trilogy pioneered character creation by wireframe modelling and matting techniques and Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs set a new benchmark. But it is rather difficult to model an actor, run him through a whole move, and keep his credibility intact.

That’s where clones could come in handy. Logically, if human cloning were ever to gain legal sanction, no fresh actor would be allowed to come in the market without a whole stable of clones in good condition. And they could start cloning him again when his medical insurance company started asking for a risk reappraisal, so that his brand can carry on even after his hushed-up death.

Finally, human cloning is only a cosmetic option in the quest for immortality. Immortality consists in the preservation of thought and the persistence of memory, not the mere perpetuation of physical form and gross structure. A clone may share its fingerprints with the original, but it cannot share its personal history, its way of thought, its politics or philosophy. The sort of immortality that cloning assures can only have crude economic uses. Dolly, for instance, is no better than a pharmaceutical factory, and an actor’s clone is just a notch above that.

Cloning does not amount to copying a person, only to copying an organism. A clone is a distinct legal entity, a discrete voter, a citizen in his own right, as much as regular biological offspring. As a unit the individual can be faithfully duplicated, people would have to be insane to try and get themselves cloned. Instead, they should content themselves with their mass-produced copies of Alicia Silverstone. Provided Mattel is taking orders, of course.