The Thin End

The prediction that human cloning will be available in 50 years raises issues, good, bad and downright ugly. Whether it is ethical will depend on whether the 'good'  is sufficient to outweigh the potential 'bad' and 'ugly'. But good and evil in this context are not easy to define or measure. Even supposing there were good reasons for using human cloning, and that is a big if, it would need to be a pressing need to outweigh the potential for harm. Currently, the risk of abnormalities is high . It has been suggested that cloning might be used to replace a lost child with a copy. And it is here a myth takes hold: the idea that cloning produces an identical human being. This is the stuff of science fiction, not of biology.  Cloning will not create identical, like-for-like people. A cloned human will not develop and become identical to the person from whom this being has been cloned. If we wanted to clone a person rather than an organism, it is highly unlikely we ...