Our society and culture has become technology junkies. When a new technology has been discovered , rarely in our haste to make that technology commercially viable, do we ever have discussions on whether we
should develop the technology . And nowhere is this more apparent than the field of genetic engineering. Aside from the religious and spiritual implications one must way if they are so disposed, it is the shear arrogance that convinces us we can face mother nature on her causal level and expect the the design to be better than the designer [the Creator]. However, just like the designers of the Titanic found out, we see that we are still way over our head. When it comes to replicating nature, you would think we would get the hint after our attempts at cloning trees resulted in
sterile forests.
My opponent conveniently omits the magnitude of what we are dealing with. Instead, he argues that “Cloning is
simply the replication of biological material”. However, when talking about issues in the field of genetic engineering, there is nothing simple about it. Trying to tweak and fine tune the basic building blocks of life cannot be viewed and treated in the same vain as giving your car a tune-up. Especially, since the science has not progressed to the point of figuring out how the engine runs. According to
Ian Wilmut, one of the scientists who produced Dolly the sheep, the first adult mammalian clone, warned recently that attempts to clone human beings at the current time were "dangerous and irresponsible".
My opponent argues that “Reproductive cloning actually takes genetic material from one organism to make a near identical replica” and that “Therapeutic cloning involves the replication of embryonic stem cell lines to grow entire organs…”, but on closer inspection, those conclusions have yet to pass the muster.
According to Rudolph Jaenisch, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ryuzo Yanagimachi's laboratory at the University of Hawaii, the team that produced mice clones from embryonic stem cells - the "master" cells that go on to form all the different tissues in the body, found that the mice clones had subtle differences in their genetic make-up that indicated something was going wrong in the regulatory process that controls whether certain genes are switched on or off in the cells used for cloning and have said, "This suggests that even apparently normal clones may have subtle aberrations of gene expression that are not easily detected in the animal clone". Which indicates things are a little more complex than simple replicating.