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I. INTRODUCTIONCloning
 I think nobody can afford to ignore the progress that is made in science today.Scientific research gives us knowledge about things that nobody ever thought about just afew years ago, for example the cloning of humans.In this essay I want to focus on this topic with special regard to the advantages anddisadvantages and the social and ethical problems. I will start with a definition of cloning.The next part of the essay will be about the beginning of life followed by a listing of arguments about advantages and disadvantages of human cloning. Furthermore my essaywill involve a look on cloning and sciene fiction and finish with the economic reasons for cloning humans.My motivation to do the essay about this topic is not only that it is crucial for everybody to think about cloning but in my mind it is also very interesting and exciting tolearn more about it. It is a scientific possibility that has become reality. Maybe cloningand genetic engineering will someday even affect my life or that of my children. I hopethat I will be able to learn enough about cloning by writing this essay so that I can makeup my mind on how I feel about this topic.
 
II. BODYTHESIS: 
There are several opinions regarding this question but the only one that is biologically demonstrable is that life begins with the fertilization of the egg cell. Thereason to support this argument is that with fertilization the genetic identity of the newlife is already determined completely since the mother′s and the father′s genes
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are fusedtogether. From this point on the embryo steadily develops and during this process thegenetic identity doesn′t change any more. You could say that the genetic identity is likean instruction for the creation of the embryo, it just takes nine months till this instructionis realized. From fertilization on the embryo develops as a human and not to a human.Some other opinions to the question where life begins are the following:1) Life begins with birth because before birth the embryo isn′t able to stay alive on it′sown. It needs the mothers body to survive and to develop to full maturity.2) Life begins when a human has the consciousness to live. Supporting this argument onehas to believe that some mentally sick people and coma patients are not living either since they probably don′t have the consciousness to live.3) Life begins after the first fourteen days,the first three months, etc. It is easilyexplainable why people favor this argument. Many have problems to define a bunch of cells ( that′s all a human is in the very beginning) as living. After some time ( for example three months) has passed one can at least recognize the shape of an embryo.Argument one has at least a reasoning but the others a hardly acceptable from the biological point of view as there is no proof for them.The reason why it is important to define the beginning of life is that with its beginningevery human has basic human rights that are unimpeachable.These rights are granted toevery human without regard of attributes like age, race, sex, state of health or anythingelse and involve the right of human dignity and the right to live. With cloning we would
 
hurt these human rights, if one believes that life begins with fertilization. When a scientisttakes stem cells from an embryo for therapeutic cloning and kills the embryo afterwardsit is a violation of the right to live. Furthermore the scientist didn′t respect the humandignity of the embryo because he uses it like a rat for his experiments and then "throws itaway". Some people still defend therapeutic cloning by saying that this kind of cloning isa very valuable technique for scientists in order to learn more about certain diseases butthat doesn’t change the crucial point that human dignity is hurt and that’s a violationagainst the law, at least in industrialized countries where these human rights belong to thelaw. Before we can make up our mind on how we feel about cloning we definitely haveto ask us where we see the beginning of life.
 
Finally, the inevitable question. Is it possible to clone humans? Actually, the questionis unanswerable. Until Dolly( the sheep, the first mammalian clone, born in 1996) camealong no mammal had been cloned by transferring a nucleus into an egg. Quiteconsiderable efforts had been made over several years to clone mice in order tounderstand how gene activity changes during embryonic development. None met withsuccess and it was acknowledged that cloning mice was not going to be straightforward.One reason why sheep, a far less well understood and less used experimental animal thanmice, should have proved easier to clone may relate to differences in the very earlieststages of mouse and sheep embryonic development. The unfertilized eggs of allmammals accumulate a supply of proteins, and the means of making more protein, asthey mature in the ovary of the mother. In this way, the egg brings with it a larder for theembryo to make use of until the embryo's own genes become active and it can supplythese things for itself. The sheep embryo makes good use of this store and does not startto depend on its own genes until the sixteen-cell stage, four cell divisions after fertilization. In contrast, the mouse embryo gets off to a very quick start, becomingreliant on the activity of its own genes after just the first division when the fertilized egg becomes two cells. Therefore, a foreign nucleus introduced into a sheep egg has a bit of  breathing space to adapt to its new role before it has to start running the show. On theother hand, a nucleus introduced into a mouse egg has to acclimatized very fast for itsgenes to be able to direct embryonic development within one cell division. Perhaps thereis just not enough time in the mouse for the extensive re-programming of gene activity
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