Marcel has allowed us the opportunity to post his essay for the benefit of ImmInst members. ~ Bruce Klein
Human Cloning and the Total Body Transplant
Biological Immortality in the 21st Century?
by Marcel Kuijsten
You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were;
and I say “Why not?” — George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
The primary goals of medicine have always been to reduce human suffering and prolong life. In the last 100 years, modern medicine has made great strides in the control of many infectious diseases, and the increase in life expectancy in the United States can be attributedalmost entirely to this fact. At the turn of the century, the average life expectancy in the United States was forty-nine. Now it is around seventy-six, a 55 percent increase in a century. If this trend continues, the average life expectancy of human beings should reach 100 years some timein the 21st century.1 However, many emerging biomedical technologies have the potential todrastically increase the human life span in the 21st century far beyond 100 years. One of these technologies is human cloning, in conjunction with the total body transplant. Cloning often evokes fearful images from Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World, but actually, cloning is found everywhere. In gardening, the use of cuttings to create genetically identical copies of plants is common and dates back several thousand years.2 In the grocery store,many fruits and vegetables are clones of specially bred plants. Although plants are easily cloned, until recently scientists were unable to clone mammals. The announcement on February 23, 1997, in The Observer, that Ian Wilmut, a Scottish scientist, and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute had successfully cloned a sheep sparked a worldwide debate on the potential benefits and ethical concerns of cloning animals and possiblyeven human beings.
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