Health & Medical Volume 1 April 2014 | Page 5

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If it was to the organ cloning supporters we would be replacing peoples damaged organs left and right, but people keep asking themselves “Which is more important, personal control of our bodies and their parts or medical and scientific progress (even if at the sole benefit of commercial interests)?”. It seems that medical and scientific progress is more important just by looking at the statistics, but organ cloning would change those statistics.

Health is another issue with organ cloning, if we used organ cloning it would help a lot with fighting genetic diseases. What has to happen for cloning to take place is all genes must be productive, if not productive genes then turn into sluggish genes. Learning in what way genes stay turned on and off might help in how to do treatment for different kinds of diseases. Organ cloning could be used to treat heart attack patients; researchers might clone in good physical shape heart cells and insert them into injured areas of the heart. So there is several benefits relating to organ cloning. One example is therapeutic cloning; in 2007 Britain scientists grew a human heart through the process of therapeutic cloning. Removing the nucleus from an egg cell as well as the nucleus from a somatic cell and combining them, doing so allows the cells to stimulate and grow into blastocyst. In the inner layer of the blastocyst are stem cells, these stem cells are what is needed to inject the patient in need of a new organ.

Organ cloning can also be an answer to the infertility problem within couples. With organ cloning parents could select exactly how they want their child to look like. They could even create an exact replica of a baby if they really wanted to with organ cloning. Researchers could clone embryos and increase the fertility, “scientists also said its benefits could range from duplicating embryos for in vitro fertilization to replacing a dying child” ( Masci 9).

Those who are supporters of human cloning, are saying that this is the best answer to couples who cannot but want to have a child of their own. The infertility treatments today are not effective, and some say that the couple goes through physical and emotional pain without any result, but with organ cloning they might see some positive result. With organ cloning, couples that cannot have children will have the opportunity of having a child that is still genetically their own. So the cause would be couple infertility, and the effect would be having children of your own thanks to organ cloning.

Organ cloning could mainly help in fighting the wide range of genetic diseases, and genetic organ failures. A lot of the diseases and organ failures we are faced with once we are older are because these diseases and organ failures are genetic. There is nothing we can do about it, but try to prevent it or treat it. So what if we could completely eliminate them using organ cloning?

The statics show there is a lot of different genetic diseases, but one of the most common diseases is the two liver diseases hemochromatosis and alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. Around 10% of The United States population has liver disease. When one family member has this disorder, siblings, parents, and children are also at risk. With the help of organ cloning, these risks would decrease. Also liver disease wouldn’t be as frightening as before because if we had organ cloning we could just clone a new liver using the cells of the previous liver and then making an exact replica; it would be like changing a broken part on your vehicle, for your vehicle to continue work. The same could be done with our body parts; we would have replacement body parts waiting for us if something were to go wrong, all with the help of organ cloning.

Organ Cloning could also help with kidney disease. As of January 8, 2014 there are now 120,990 people waiting for lifesaving organ transplants in the U.S. of the 120,990 people there are 99,201 that are waiting kidney transplants. Last year, 14,029 kidney transplants took place in the U.S. Of these, 9,314 kidney transplants came from deceased donors and 4,715 came from living donors. If we used organ cloning we wouldn’t have to rely on dead people or Living donors for organs, we would use our own organs to replace our damaged organs. The statistics for kidney living donors are that from the ages of 18-34 only 30.1% will donate, ages 35-49 only 40.9%, ages 50-64 only 27.0% and ages 65 and up only 2.0% will donate.