• Question: Will cloning become a standard medical procedure?

    Asked by naimasultana123 to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      Hi again
      I’m not sure that cloning will ever be ‘standard’ but it is certainly very useful as part of a package of techniques to assess lots of things, e.g. how medicines work. There are natural clones all around us, e.g. twins. Cloning of a person into another identical person is not likely to ever be something we do, not least because of the ethical issues and also the fact that the clone would never actually ‘be’ the original – so what’s the point.

      I heard of a very rich woman in the US who arranged for her cat to be cloned because she missed it when it died. However, the cloned cat that was born was totally different to the original because of X-inactivation, where some genes are switched off in cells. This meant that although the cat was indeed a genetic identical, the environment it was born into was different and it therefore had totally different colouring and a different personality. It ended up nothing like the original and the owner was very disappointed (which serves her right as any geneticist could have told her the outcome was not what she was expecting!)

    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      There are quite few hurdles to overcome before it becomes routine, but I do believe it will be used medicine.

      Not for the use of cloning humans – there are too many ethical issues. Instead I think it’ll be used for cloning individual body parts. Just think, you could clone a new heart made from your own stem cells: no need to wait for a matching donor.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:


      The answer to this depends on what you mean by cloning. Cloning one human from another is not likely to be used as a medical procedure, because of all the ethical issues around this–there are lots of science fiction books and films that explore these ideas, but basically, all people have feelings and personalities and it would be very cruel to grow people just to harvest their organs.

      Cloning cells, on the other hand is something that is already done. We can clone DNA into bacteria to make them produce medicines, for example. And people are working on cloning human tissues so that we can grow new organs for sick people.

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