Very few animal clones make it to birth, and the ones that do usually have serious health problems, including physical deformities (such as enlarged umbilical cords) to life-threatening conditions (like being born with no immune system) (Boyce 42). Less than three percent o

Cloning humans would be a dangerous thing. There would be many health concerns, not only to the cloned baby, but to the mother as well. Many cloned animals do not even make it to birth, due to the fact that they are unusually large and do not have enough room to develop in the uterus. Cloned animals have nearly always had some sort of obvious defect, and the ones that do not look normal almost always are not really normal. Also, there are 30,000 genes and the chances are extremely small that an egg cell would reprogram all of these genes correctly (Kolata 1). As a result, the clones are not normal. Because of all of this, cloning should be made illegal.

Another reason why all cloning should be made completely illegal is the fact that the cloning technology is far from perfected. "It's a wonder [cloning] works at all" (Kolata 1). One reason cloning does not always work the way scientists want it to is because reprogramming the eggs to clone can go wrong, and preliminary molecular biology experiments confirm this. Naturally produced sperm organizes its genetic !!!!!!!!!!material over a period of months; eggs take years to form their DNA. Mammalian !!!!!!!!!!clones...force the reprogramming to take place within a matter of hours. The !!!!!!!!!!rapidity of the process results in random errors in the expression on the individual !!!!!!!!!!genes (Griffith 6). There are thousands of genes, and there is only an extremely slim chance that the egg alone will reprogram all of them correctly. "What irks . . . !!!!!!!!!!cloning experts is that there is no known way to test an embryo for !!!!!!!!!!reprogramming errors. Today's prenatal tests can find problems with !!!!!!!!!!chromosomes--a sign of Down's syndrome and certain other diseases--or errors !!!!!!!!!!in the chemical sequence of a gene, which may suggest cystic fibrosis or other !!!!!!!!!!genetic disorders. But scientists are just beginning to understand how adult !!!!!!!!!!genes revert to a fetal state in cloning (Kolata 1). If a human were to be cloned, a slight defect in the brain could mean trouble for the clone. "The worry is the fetus that appears normal but is not . . . A subtle brain defect might mean little in an animal . . . but it would be very important to a parent aching to have a healthy child" (Kolata 1). Scientists who wanted to clone a human have claimed that they could find defects in the reprogramming of the embryos by the egg, but experts disagree. ". . . experts say that [a team that tries to clone a human being] may be able to spot embryos that are obviously flawed, but that those embryos would likely die on their own anyway" (Kolata 1).

Because very little is known about the possible negative outcomes of cloning, researchers continue to experiment. New theories believe that genetic imprints is one of the problems: "[Genetic imprinting is] a poorly understood molecular !!!!!!!!!!mechanism through which genes inside sperm and egg cells are turned on or !!!!!!!!!!off in preparation for early embryonic and fetal development. Problems arise !!!!!!!!!!in clones, it se

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Approximate Word count = 2076
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)