In today’s society we have a vast growing population. For some reason though, scientists want to experiment with reproductive technology on humans. They have used it on animals before; it seemed to work, so they think that it will work on humans. Back in 1997, they first used it on Dolly the sheep and they made a perfect clone. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World they use these factories to clone embryos and there are no mothers or fathers. The mention of fathers or mothers makes this society laugh. This is mainly because they never heard of them because they were born by cloning. If this happened to our society it would be a whole new world. To imagine a life without parents or legal guardians is incomprehensible. In an article by the New York Times, titled ‘Cloning Is Used to Create Embryonic Stem Cells’ (Pollack), they discuss how scientists have effectively cloned humans. This could be the new future of our society. No parents just cloned children from factories, like Brave New World. This society could be the future of our society. It would be no doubt that in the future, cloning would be a regular thing. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that because without parents how are children going to know right from wrong. Society is heading on the path to human reproductive cloning. If we don’t stop or at least slow down then we will be just like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. To use cloning on humans is unnecessary. Today’s society will be affected by cloning in three ways. They will be affected by the lack of a parent as a role model, the lack of knowledge that parents have, and the lack of true love of a family. These are the three main ways that our society would be affected by cloning.
In ‘Cloning Is Used to Create Embryonic Stem Cells'(Pollack), an article by The New York Times, ‘scientists have succeeded in cloning human cells. Scientists, at a university, took skin cells from a baby with a genetic disease and bonded them with donated eggs to create human embryos that were genetically equal to the child. This is amazing because now we could clone animals knowing it works on humans. Cloning animals is okay because we need them for food and if something did go wrong it’s not like it’s a human. Human cloning could be dangerous though even if it worked the first time. They should run more tests just to be sure it works. They said it wouldn’t lead to a birth of a child. This is good because if every time they cloned an embryo that lead to a birth of a baby then you’d have a surplus population and that would just be chaos. It would especially be chaos in the United States where we already have three hundred million people. The fact they were capable of getting cloned embryos to endure long enough for abstraction is seen as a stage toward reproductive cloning in humans. Society would enjoy it if they had successfully invented reproductive cloning because then everyone could just clone themselves to make life easier. This is called therapeutic cloning. Therapeutic cloning is making stem cells that are identical to a particular patient. Stem cells can turn into any cell in the body, such as heart cells or muscles. This could be a good thing because in hospitals they could just make someone a new heart very easily. That would mean one day the cells could be turned into replacement tissue or organs to treat a multitude of diseases. This could save many lives in the future which always is a wonderful thing. Researchers have been trying for more than a decade to create human cells using different cloning methods. Scientists can now use fully-grown skin cells to generate a stem cell similar to it without the necessity for embryos. These are known as induced pluripotent stem cells also known as IPS cells. A con to this is that there may never be enough eggs to treat all of the population. Donors can endure serious side effects from the hormones necessary to produce all these eggs. Most people who’d want replacement tissues, however, are likely to be elderly not young and prosperous teens for example.’ (Pollack)
One scene that relates to the topic of cloning is when they are on the tour of the Embryo lab. ”And now ‘ I’d like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals” (Huxley 17). Because Alphas receive special conditioning, Betas and Epsilons will never reach the Alphas’ standards and will, as a result, always suffer discrimination. Huxley believes cloning people constructs a social pyramid where people will never gain the opportunity to move up or down, creating a present-day society. Many people would most likely be persecuted today if they didn’t have parents. People would see them as different and not treat them with respect. It would also mean that a clone would be owned by the government. That would mean they would most likely have restrictions on what they can do. Cloning may not be a very important invention. Another scene is when Mustapha Mond tells John that some clones have limited capabilities. ”Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello” (Huxley 220). Huxley shows the inequality disagreeing with Alphas would cause by giving the Alphas all the main positions. Giving Alphas the main positions makes cloning unethical because giving Alphas all the power creates imbalanced competition for Betas and Epsilons. This could mean that one day we won’t even know what freedom is. We’d be living under a dystopia, a dictatorship. We won’t read old material like Shakespeare and the Bible. That could mean that Christianity, the most common religion in the world, would vanish from society in the future. Much of today’s society is Catholic or some other Christian denomination so much of society would either have to deny their faith or be banished from society. We also wouldn’t have plays or theaters for that matter because Shakespeare was known for the theater. There will still be things called ‘feelies’ (186) which are similar to movies but you can feel and smell what is happening hence the name feely.
Cloning is a significant concern in today’s society because we are so influenced by our parents that we couldn’t imagine life without them. It’s hard to imagine a world of cloned individuals because we aren’t used to it. The potential effects are that we may just forget what parents are and forget the true love of the family. The issues involved are the research of human reproductive cloning and the loss of parental influence in these clones. This also involves the loss of Christianity and thus the loss of God. This is a big problem because if no one believes in God any more than who is going to go to heaven. If this is what our future is like we should definitely turn it around right now before we all lose the things important to our lives.
Works Cited
Pollack, Andrew. ‘Cloning Is Used to Create Embryonic Stem Cells.’ New York Times 16 May
2013: A17 (L). Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Print.