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Is Human Cloning Possible?

by BioTimes

Written by: Mithila Kasbe

Edited by: Namrata Raghavan

We have heard of scientists trying to clone human embryos, and it has been successful for nearly a decade. But we have never heard of someone trying to clone an actual human being. We have only seen that in movies. Science fiction can get pretty wild. But even, in reality, we have achieved so many commendable things. But no one has declared that they intended on making a cloned baby. But why is that so? It seems cool, right? Imagine having two of yourselves; absolutely identical. Will that be amazing or there will be some consequences? That's something to think about, isn't it?

The first-ever mammal that was cloned from adult cells, was Dolly the sheep. The topic came to light in February 1997. Here the egg from one sheep (Scottish Blackface sheep) was taken, and its nucleus which had the DNA was removed. This was fused into the egg of another sheep (Finn Dorset sheep). A jolt of electricity was then given so that the fusion and replication can take place. The cells were placed n the uterus of another sheep and there it was. A clone! But it wasn't as easy. It took the scientists around 277 tries to get one dolly!

This technique is called reproductive cloning and it can be used on humans as well. But the problem comes in collecting the eggs from a donor, which raises an ethical issue and finding the many surrogates which would agree to carry the embryos. There have been many researchers who have experimented on this. For example, Qiang Sun and Zhen Liu reported the birth of the very first monkey clones, which was the first time when reproductive cloning was successful in primates. It was quite an inefficient process, since out of the 80 cloned embryos, only 2 resulted in live births!

So, it was seen that human cloning is very much possible. But why is it that no one has made or announced the experiments involving the cloned human babies? The first being some countries that have banned the conduction of any such experiments. Not just this, but there is a high rate of danger when it comes to the cloned fetus as well as the surrogate who's carrying that fetus. Some embryos might expire before implantation, others might result in miscarriages or some might even die during birth, or they would end up having severe abnormalities.

One of the biggest reasons out of all is that there isn't a good enough reason for creating a human clone! Why? Because creating a clone of some individual would only result in a twin. It won't be the replica of that person. This is similar to an identical twin situation, as they share the same genetic material, but their personalities can be different!

Therapeutic Cloning:

This is similar to reproductive cloning, but the only difference is that the embryo is not implanted in the uterus. The main objective of this technique is to extract stem cells from the embryo created, which can be used for many aspects in medical treatments such as treatment of some disease or regeneration/repair of tissues. This can be used to make organs that might save an individual's life. This brings us to the question. If we need to generate clones to save a person's life, why make an entirely new clone using reproductive cloning, when you can just make the respective organ using therapeutic cloning?

Of course, there are some disadvantages to this technique as well. One of them being the immune response when transplanting an organ. It should be taken care of that the recipient does not evoke an immune response that will serve as a hurdle in the transplantation process. Another one being the difficulty in generating a cloned human embryonic stem cell line from the embryos is very difficult, since the resulting embryo is very short-lived which is about 5-6 days.

The Raëlians:

This is a very interesting speculation, rather a true(ish) incident, about a cloned human. There was a religious cult called the Raëlians. They believed that humans were cloned from aliens and that they commanded that humans should clone themselves, as it's the only way they would teach immortality. After 3 months of Dolly's birth, this group created an organization called Clonaid, led by Brigitte Boisselier. After a while, in 2002, they announced that the first-ever cloned human baby named Eve has been born. But it's been almost two decades and there hasn't been any proof that Eve is still alive or ever existed. I guess we'll have to wait and see.