by Barnaby Meins

Created on: June 04, 2010

Since the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, the tremendous potential of biotechnology has received increasing recognition. Currently, cloning has diversified into inter-related fields with the hope that it will provide a better future for mankind. However, with regards to specific fields of biotechnology, the actual potential benefit may be overestimated when compared to the current facts. This is the scenario for therapeutic cloning.

Therapeutic cloning is based on the transfer of the nucleus, which contains the genetic material, of a cell to an unfertilised egg without the nucleus. These cells are then cultivated to develop into differentiated forms of genetically-identical tissues and organs that can be implanted into humans to replace the defective ones. 

Throughout the world, cell therapy has been used extensively with the aim of integrating therapeutically cultivated cells to replace any defective ones. For many, this may be the answer to the problem of shortage of organ donors, considering that people die yearly due to organ shortage. In order to attract world-class researchers, governments have offered numerous incentives. For example, Dr. Colman, who helped clone Dolly, now heads the Singapore-Australia biotech company, ES Cell International after the Singapore government offered a $6 million grant.

However, the down side of such cell therapy, such as the ethical issues that arise from the research, execution and encouragement of therapeutic cloning, may prove more of a burden to handle. Here, ethics is generally defined as the moral dilemma faced between two choices that may result in disparate repercussions. The medical and commercial ethical issues of therapeutic cloning will be described in the following paragraphs.

Medical ethics is the study of moral values applied to medicine. The medical ethics dilemma arises from the difference in opinions between the researchers and the general public. The two groups have different views over the large number of cells required, which are eventually destroyed in the therapeutic cloning research process (Mombaerts, 2003).

The reason for such large-scale usage and destruction of cells is due to the current low success rate of therapeutic cloning. It has been proven that the success rate for nuclear transfer to produce a viable cell and for the actual cloned cell to grow in a monitored way to produce the organ desired is low. The reason for the latter is largely because scientists have yet to fully understand

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