By
Ayse Guner
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Biological duplication can lead to medical breakthroughs, other benefits
Allen Buchanan, a UA philosophy professor, said he thinks the public has been battling with an exaggerated anxiety over cloning, but the technology that is underway to produce the first human clone cannot be stopped.
Instead, the concerns should focus on more significant issues like nuclear power or diseases that kill millions, such as AIDS, he said.
Buchanan was one of six professors to speak at the sixth annual conference on "Healing arts: medicine, ethics, humanities" on Saturday, an event organized by the UA College of Medicine to promote discussion on health care and its relation to the healing arts.
The subjects ranged from the reflection of death in opera to American Indian cultural beliefs. But one that galvanized numerous questions from the audience was a recent topic in medical ethics - the role of cloning.
The public concern about cloning has been marred by the thought of re-creating dictators like Adolf Hitler, or by the idea of a cloned person having the same destiny as that person's genetically identical twin, Buchanan said.
However, these are "old ethical problems arisen in new forms," he said, adding that when the first test tube baby technology was introduced, the public had similar ethical concerns of the outcome.
"We don't give ourselves enough credit to being able to adopt new technologies," Buchanan said, who served as a staff philosopher to former President Bill Clinton's commission on medical ethics, and is a member of the Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Although cloning had been performed on animals like goats, pigs and mice, scientists have recently announced such technology can be performed on humans.
Panayiotis Zavos, an infertility specialist from the University of Kentucky, and Severino Antinori, an Italian researcher, made public last month the beginning of a human cloning test.
Similarly, the New York Times reported in February about the actions of a religious group called Raelians, which claims it can potentially clone humans.
The mechanics of cloning technology - begun with the cloning of a sheep named Dolly in 1997 - operates by taking a donor egg, removing the yolk, or the nucleus, by the use of a needle and introducing it to a skin cell from the human being copied. Scientists use electrical pulses to duplicate the recomposed cell.
"And what is unique about this process is that the DNA of the individual produced has only one of the individual's DNA," Buchanan said about the couples who want to have a cloned baby.
Buchanan said human cloning is not wrong and there can be some benefits of the use of such technology, if it is not misused.
As in the case of infertile or gay couples who want a biologically related child without collaborating with a third party, the process of cloning should be justified, he said.
Also, if one of the partners carries a genetic disease and "if you don't want to have a genetic lottery," which could mean 50 percent chance of the child having the same disease, "you can clone the cell of the parent who doesn't have the disease," Buchanan said.
More problematic use of cloning technology, though, may emerge if permanently unconscious human beings are created as organ and tissue banks for the use of other individuals, he said.
"This is already done but not by cloning," Buchanan said, adding that organs have been removed from infants who are born without brains for the use of other people's needs.
"If you think it is ever justified to do that, do you also think creating humans for this would be justified?" he asked. "If not, then what is the difference between these two significant cases?"
Similar public reactions such as "cloning violates the right to security of human genetic material," which is the statement of the Human Cloning World Health Organization, has turned into a national debate.
People fear their cells would be stolen and be copied, but "people who most worry about this are likely to be most vulnerable to this," Buchanan said.
Instead, the public should support institutes devoted to the education of cloning technology, Buchanan said, because there has been a confusion of genetic identity with personal identity.
"To clone you is not to produce another you, but to produce another individual that is genetically identical to you," he said. "Does the existence of another individual with your identically genetic material threaten you?
"It would if genetic determinism would be true, but it is not because the environmental forces affect that," he said.
"Your life will not be predetermined according to that individual's life," Buchanan added. "You choose one profession to another - you choose one college to another."
In addition, dictators like Hitler or Saddam Hussein, which the public fears would create mass destruction if they were cloned, should not be a reason to ban the technology, Buchanan said.
"Dictators already have a way to do that through education and a propaganda system," he said.
