With the successful cloning of animals, many people have reacted with frightening and usually uninformed ideas about what cloning is and what researchers hope to achieve through it. Many wish to ban all cloning without even looking at the positive things that cloning will be able to provide for us in the future and with continued research. Like any new technology, people are at first afraid, but this is no excuse to abandon research that could one day save millions of people through cloned organs or give an alternative and safe means of reproduction to sterile couples. The uninformed also look to popular culture instead of facts to argue against cloning. Jurassic Park, Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau have shown to the majority of American the dark, evil side of genetic engineering. Major breakthroughs of the century in science have occurred and we are not ready for it. "For a thousand years, the concept of human dignity was closely bound to the idea that God had created the Garden of Eden in the very center of the universe and that the rest of the cosmos was formed as a series of concentric circles radiating out of Eden, the belly button of reality" (Palmer 53). The scientific breakthrough of cloning has caused a great deal of controversy in the media and also in the government. The advantages of cloning are tremendous to the human race and cannot be disregarded.
One must understand that cloning does not produce an exact copy of the person being cloned. "To clone any animal, Navara says the first step is to take the DNA out of an egg. DNA is the part of a cell that tells it what to do. Then, scientists inject the DNA from the organism they want to clone into that egg and try to get it to divide and grow into an embryo. In reproductive cloning, the embryo is then implanted into a surrogate, where it is supposed to continue to develop" (Discovery 1). What cloning does is that it copies the DNA/genes of the person and creates a duplicate genetically.
