By now, everyone has heard about Dolly the sheep that was successfully cloned as an adult from somatic cells. While this was a scientific breakthrough, it has also lead to a vast amount of questions surrounding the procedure, what other mammals it might work on, and even weather or not a human being could be cloned. This question in particular has been the root of a seemingly perpetual debate over the ethical issues versus the scientific possibilities of human cloning. A quick Google search for "Human Cloning" will return over 11,000,000 results in under a second. With all of the various arguments coming from both sides, it is important to understand the pros of human and partial human cloning from the standpoint of medical professionals. It is also important to realize that this is one of the most promising breakthroughs in recent medical science, and that human cloning should not be excluded from government funding put towards medical research, at the provincial and federal levels. Human cloning could provide a solution to infertile parents; it could provide organs for transplant; and it could assist in curing life-threatening diseases. .
First and foremost, infertility could be effectively combatted through the process of cloning. A scientist would take an ovum from a female donor, removing the nucleus and thus leaving an "empty" egg. From there, a single skin cell (somatic cell) would be removed from either, or both, parents and the nucleus from these somatic cells would then be inserted into the "empty" egg thus fertilizing an egg for development inside a womb like any other conceived egg, but without the emotionally, financially, and physically draining process of other fertility treatments with a much higher predicted success rate. This process could also be applied in the situation of gay and lesbian couples. In a lesbian couple, the DNA of one mother would be combined with an egg extracted from the other mother figure, fertilizing it and reinserting it into the womb to carry out the development process.
