Case Study 37 :CLONING AROUND
Challenges
A 27-year-old male, single, was admitted for severe headache. He had been a consistent honor student and an excellent gymnast, despite a four-year history of on and off tolerable frontal throbbing headache treated as migraine with sibelium. Two hours prior to admission, he complained of severe throbbing bitemporal headache associated with non-projectile vomiting. He was rushed to the Emergency Department where he suddenly became comatose. Having had an excellent performance in school and in sports, some scientists contemplate cloning him.
Question
What considerations arise on cloning, from the pragmatic (or usefulness) point of view?
Solutions
At least in the near future, the cloning procedure could involve producing many candidate clones, from among which one or more will be selected and brought to maturity. What happens to those not lucky enough to be considered fit or needed? Just like defective or extra photocopies are discarded, used as scratch, or kept for the future, unused human clones would probably be killed and thrown away, used in experiments (human experiments, that is) or frozen for future use.
Clones can be utilized for several purposes. A dictator with long-range plans, combining cloning and genetic engineering, can design a breed of super warriors, strong but dumb and highly programmable. A young businessman may decide to produce a cheap source of manpower for his ventures by cloning specialized workers. Some add that made to order clones (even farmed or mass-produced) could provide vital body parts, eliminating tissue rejection and the need for donors. Note that these and other scenarios at least implicitly perceive clones as somewhat less than human.
A frequently overlooked issue in medicine is free and informed consent: after informing the subject on (and ensuring understanding of) the purpose of the procedure, anticipated risks and benefits, alternative procedures, and hoped-for results, the subject should be free to accept or reject the procedure. But one can only wonder how any clone could consent, having been manufactured in the first place simply to be used.
