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Cloning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Ruth F. Chadwick
Ruth F. Chadwick
Affiliation:
St Martin's College, Lancaster
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Extract

Every body cell of an animal or human being contains the same complete set of genes. In theory any of these cells can be used to start a new embryo. The technique has been employed in the case of frogs. The nucleus is taken out of a body cell of a frog and implanted in an enucleated frog's egg. The resulting egg cell is stimulated to develop into a normal frog, and will be an exact copy of that frog which provided the nucleus with all the genetic information. In normal sexual reproduction, two parents each contribute half their genes, but in the case of cloning, one parent passes on all his or her genes.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 57 , Issue 220 , January 1982 , pp. 201 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1980

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References

1 David M. Rorvik, In His Image (London: Sphere, 1978).

2 Derek Bromhall, ‘The Great Cloning Hoax‘, New Statesman (2 June 1978) 734-736.

3 R. M. Hare, ‘Abortion and the Golden Rule‘, Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1975) 201-222.

4 Cf. J. S. Mill, ‘Nature‘, in Three Essays on Religion (London, 1874) 8, where ‘nature’ is defined as ‘all the powers existing in either the outer or the inner world and everything which takes place by means of these powers‘, or as ‘what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man‘.

5 The naturalistic fallacy would be committed only if it were held that to say! that cloning is ‘unnatural’ in some descriptive sense entailed that cloning in wrong. That is not the view under discussion.

6 See e.g. John Harris, ‘The Survival Lottery‘, Philosophy 50 (1975) 84.

7 Seymour Lederberg, ‘Law and Cloning: The State as Regulator of Gene Function‘, in A. Milunsky and G. J. Annas (eds), Genetics and the Law (New York: Plenum, 1976) 377-386.

8 8 See e.g. Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘The Right to Privacy‘, Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1975) 295-314; James Rachels, ‘Why Privacy is Important‘, ibid. 323-333.

9 Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

10 Derek Parfit, ‘Personal Identity‘, in Jonathan Glover (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 1976) 142-162.

11 Bernard Williams, ‘Are Persons Bodies?’ in Problems of the Self (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 81.

12 Arno G. Motulsky, ‘Brave New World?’ in Thomas R. Mertens (ed.), Human Genetics: readings on the implications of genetic engineering (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975) 280-308.