<span class="SFPTagline">
From SCIFIPEDIA
</span>
A Clone is an organism or cell product that is genetically identical to the organism or unit from which it was derived through asexual reproduction. In the cloning of mammals, the nucleus of a blood cell is inserted into an egg causing the development of a new animal identical to the original. The most famous example of mammalian cloning was the cloned sheep Dolly, created in Scotland in 1996.
Science Fiction
Ethical and philosophical discussion has, for the most part, determined human cloning to be unethical though some believe it to be inevitable. Science fiction has, for many years before the successful cloning of mammals, warned against human cloning. Clones are often portrayed as evil versions of the original, soulless, and tools to be used as slave labor, and armed forces.
Literature
Film
In the 1978 film The Boys from Brazil, Hitler's executioner and geneticist, Josef Mengele, escapes to Brazil and creates 94 clones of the fuhrer. Unable to depend solely on biology, they attempt to recreate the events that shaped the original. Cloning is more humorously addressed in the 1996 Michael Keaton film, Multiplicity, when a father clones himself multiple times in order to meet the demands of his family and career.
Quotes
- Author David Brin: "Cloning is as inevitable as flight or electricity. It needn't damn us. The key moral point is that a clone of any person will be a living, organic person, with his or her full suite of human rights. Duplicated genes won't change this, any more than we view one identical twin as a "spare" of the other. If we make this stand, the straw-man moral quandaries—like rich people growing a fresh organs to harvest from a new self in the basement—nearly all vanish. That's not a spare. It's a child, imprisoned by a monster." Scifi.com Interview
-
- US Senator Tom Harkin: "Human cloning will take place, and it will take place in my lifetime. And I don't fear it at all -- I welcome it. I think it's right and proper that we continue this kind of inquiry." Thinkexist Tom Harkin quotes
-
- US Senator Sam Brownback: "Human cloning is the deliberate creation of a human life for utilitarian purposes. That life is created simply for research or for the benefit of another. Any time in history when we have subjected one class of human beings to enslavement by another class has been wrong." Thinkexist - Sam Brownback quotes
-
- Professor George Annas: "Cloning of a human being is intuitively and properly viewed with almost uniform horror, because replication of a human by cloning would radically alter the very definition of what a human being is." Thinkexist George Annas Quotes
External Links
This article or section is a
SCIFIPEDIA stub for the category
Science and possibly others. You can improve SCIFIPEDIA
by expanding on this stub]. Please be sure to consider the other categories assigned to this stub by the original creator. When finished, remove this stub from the article and the article from the
Science stubs category.
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
