Will Human Cloning Be Allowed In China? Can Cloning Help Extend Human's Lifespan?   

I’ve heard about how China is busily cloning certain animals that can be used to bear offspring, and these offspring could be used as food sources for humans.  Furthermore, China is allowing their scientists to clone animals to bear offspring or not for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and medical advancement purposes.  Just in, a company in China claims that the technology is there for cloning human beings.  According to the video right after the break, the CEO of Boyalife Group, a Chinese biotechnology company, claimed that his company has the technology to clone human beings.  His problem is that China may have yet to allow his company to proceed with human cloning.

Livestock cloning matter is already something that people are so skeptical about for ethical and health reasons, but human being cloning is on a level in which it’s out of this world.  We, humans, are so religiously worried about the consequences of playing God.  Human cloning can have a lot of resistance from all walks of life.  We would worry what will be the consequences when humans can be cloned so easily because God will no longer be in control of traditional mechanisms that produce life such as natural birth.

Nonetheless, in recent decades, we have been improving healthcare to the point that we can apply science and medical advancements to help God rescue lives from the grim reaper.  We even have the medical technology to either alleviate or eliminate illnesses of babies that are still inside a mother’s womb.  Recent medical advancements show us that technology does help us preserve and improve human lives on a level that never has been achieved before in human history.  Well, at least before the known recording of human history.  With the knowledge of which to allow humans to play God for good purposes, do we feel confident enough to play God himself by cloning human beings?  What will be the consequences if human cloning technology gets proliferated?

I suspect that if human cloning is to be allowed, there will be experiments that would deploy human cloning as a means to explore the realm of immortality.  Nonetheless, during this process, how torturous for the test subjects we shall never know.  I suspect… this could be something that any person with common sense would quickly reject such a possibility because human moral values won’t agree with the idea of having another human being as a guinea pig for the purpose of medical advancements.  Will immortality for humans encourage the advancements of human cloning and what would come after human cloning?

As of right now, personally, I’m conflicted on human cloning technology, because on one hand, I want to see the advancement to be made in biotechnology, but I also know that there are ethical issues that must be resolved in order for me to feel comfortable with the idea of cloning humans.

What ethical issues?  I’m not too religiously worried about how human cloning would lead to the deterioration of religions because anyone who believes in any God probably could argue that cloning is allowed to happen because it’s the will of a God or Buddha or Allah or any other deity in which one happens to be worshipping.  The ethical issue I’m worrying of is about the unknown human values that would materialize from the proliferation of human cloning technology.

For an instance, once human cloning is done in a proliferated manner, will we care how many people would be killed in World War?  Remember, we can always clone one more of you.  Perhaps, there could be a biotechnology security protocol in which instructional manual and DNA materials would be stored in a manner of Noah's Ark but with a futuristic sense, and in this way, cloning could be used to restore the human population after a major war that would wipe out the majority of people on earth.  With such a protocol, a bold and insane leader could worry less about using nuclear weapons against an enemy of his or her nation.

Human cloning advancement can encourage us, humans, to explore the side of immortality.  China’s first emperor was so obsessed with immortality to the point that he sent out groups of people to faraway places to look for immortality in all forms and manners for him.  But all was in vain for China’s first emperor.  Immortality was seriously explored two thousand years ago with no modern medical knowledge, but with the cloning technology of today, we humans may begin exploring this idea once again.  The truth is that we may not be able to manufacture immortality because even the sun would become cold and lonely eventually.  Nonetheless, I think with the advancement of cloning, we humans may have a better understanding of how to improve the lifespan of a human.

Perhaps, we won’t live forever, but we could live to 300 years of age without the side effects of being old.  Of course, human cloning won’t be the only factor that may contribute to our understanding of how to extend a human’s lifespan, because this would require the involvement of a plethora of fields of other scientific nature.  Nonetheless, I think cloning may contribute a great deal to our understanding of how to extend a human lifespan.