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A Spiritual Perspective on Human Cloning

For many years a debate about the various issues pertaining to human cloning has been going on around the world. The debate is mostly centered on social, moral and ethical issues. In this article we look at human cloning from a spiritual perspective.

Spiritual research into human cloning 

A seeker of SSRF having advanced sixth sense or extrasensory perception (ESP) did spiritual research into human cloning and has received divine knowledge about human cloning in the form of a comparative study between a human clone generated from a single cell and a human being generated from the fusion of a sperm and ovum. 

This comparison was across some key parameters and the accuracy of this knowledge has been verified by His Holiness Dr. Athavale, a Saint of the highest order with highly advanced sixth sense and the founder of Spiritual Science Research Foundation Inc. 

Comparison between a human clone and a human born by fertilization of sperm and ovum  

The following is a summary of the key findings.  

The physical capacity of the individual to adjust to the environment – A cloned human has 30% of adjastment capacity whereas a normal human has 50% capacity. An individual with 100% capacity (as seen in the spiritually evolved) would be completely unfazed by any extremes or fluctuations in the environment and would deal with it in a completely balanced manner.
Capacity to procreate – A cloned human has 30% capacity whereas a normal human has 50% ability to procreate (having in mind that an average person today is able to give 10 offspring if no contraceptive is taken).
Birth due to willful action / willful action – The birth of a human clone is 100% willful action and the birth of normal human is due to destiny
One’s wish / God’s wish – Clone takes birth due to our own wish whereas a normal human is born with God’s wish and thus this type of birth is aligned with the Divine Law.
Quality of first generation human clone – Quality of first generation human clone is 30% and quality of first generation normal human was 70%. The highest quality of spiritually evolved human being is 100%.
Quality of fifth generation human clone – Due to various reasons the quality of human clone in fifth generation would be 0% as it keeps on deteriorating with every consecutive birth.
Completing the give and take account - Unlike the spiritually evolved, a normal human being is born with one of the basic purpose of completing and nullifying the give and take account. The present era and the soroundings are 70% conducive for a normal human to complete his give and take but for a human clone it is 30% as the birth is not as per the Divine Law. (For a spiritually evolved, any time is 100% conducive as they are born by Their own wish with a specific Divine Mission and do not have any give and take accounts to nullify.)
Likelihood of distress form distressing energies – For human clones the likelihood is 50% and for normal human it is 30%. There is a higher likelihood of possession by a ghost right at the time of conception which is less in the case of a normal person.

Key background points:

In the present times the mode spiritual level of an average person in society across the world is 20%. (if on a scale of 0-100%, 0% would be innanimate objects and 100% a God realised Soul)
All references to ‘average person’ or ‘Human from fertilized ovum’ in this article refers to a spiritually average person, i.e. a person having a spiritual level close to 20%. This spiritually average person could well be a billionaire, a head of state or a celebrity from show business.

Summary

Whatever benefits we may possibly hope to derive from human cloning at the physical and mental level, it would be pertinent to carefully consider the spiritual repercussions. Unless we do this we will be doing humanity at large a massive disservice.

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Human cloning

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Disadvantages of Human Cloning

Cloning is considered the great medical breakthrough of our age. As the definition says clones are copies of another human’s look or what he/she likes to eat, but a person’s whole personality is based on the experiences in his/her life and there is no method of cloning that can replace the personality. There are also medical disadvantages in human cloning, which make the benefits less effective. It was first thought that stem cells could only be harvested from embryos, but today’s researchers are finding that any human cell can be manipulated to replace any tissue of the body.

Health risks from mutation of genes – an abnormal baby would be a nightmare come true. The technique is extremely risky right now. A particular worry is the possibility that the genetic material used from the adult will continue to age so that the genes in a newborn baby clone could be – say – 30 years old or more on the day of birth. Many attempts at animal cloning produced disfigured monsters with severe abnormalities. So that would mean creating cloned embryos, implanting them and destroying (presumably) those that look imperfect as they grow in the womb.

One of the manor Disadvantages of cloning is that there is a continuous debate relating to the ethical issue of cloning. The concept of cloning is hurting a lot of human sentiments ans human believes. There is a lot of controversy regarding whether cloning is ethical or not. at the present time the controversy is storming the world and took a great shape. The whole world seems ti get divided in the issues relating to cloning. The Christianity as well as Judaism do not support the destruction of embryo or the creation of human being artificially.

Cloning has always been a subject whose thoughts both fascinates and frightens the world. On February 27, 1997, a stunning announcement appeared in the British journal Nature that rocked the scientific world: for the first time ever recorded, a mammal- a lamb named Dolly had been successfully cloned from an adult cell. Coinciding with this shocking proclamation, scientist reported the successful cloning of a rhesus monkey, a primate whose reproduction and development is almost identical to man.

Potential Benefits of Cloning

Cloning Animals.-Cloning animals would serve many useful purposes and will be the focus of a major biotechnology industry. The immediate driving force at Roslin was to develop more efficient transgenic animals-animals which have been altered by the addition of genes of other species, such as humans. Current methods, which rely on microinjection of the desired DNA into the nucleus of an egg, are both unreliable and inefficient. If foreign DNA, such as a human gene, could be introduced into cell lines in culture, cells expressing the human genes could then be the source of donor nuclei for cloning. All offspring would then express the desired human gene.

Much current attention is now focused on altering the genes of cows or sheep so that they will produce large amounts of pharmaceutically important proteins in their milk, such as insulin or factor VIII to treat hemophilia. Indeed, it is this application which generated the Wilmut study-the desire to make a transgenic sheep that would include human insulin in its milk, thus providing an efficient source of that substance. There is also interest in producing pigs whose genes have been altered to produce a component of the human immune system’s regulatory proteins. This would make pig organs more suitable for human transplantation.

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Cloning – Genetic Carbon Copy Controversies

Dolly the Sheep became an instant celebrity in 1996 when UK scientists (quite literally) created the world’s first clone of a mammal using an adult cell. As controversial as Dolly’s creation was her early death in 2003.

The international press was abuzz: Does cloning violate scientific ethics? Is it right to produce a genetic copy that is evidently inferior till you hit the right one?

Dolly’s stuffed remains may have been relegated to the Royal Museum at Edinburgh, but the debates she started brought the issue of cloning a little too close to home: making genetic carbon copies of human beings.

Cloning Outlawed?

In 2005, the UN General Assembly (in a vote of 84 to 34) appealed to its member nations to ban any type of human cloning. Cloning is defined as the process of creating an exact replica of an organism, cell, or gene. The UN stated that human cloning is ‘incompatible with human dignity’ and goes against protecting human life.

Dozens of nations the world over have enacted laws that ban any type of human cloning. France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and Canada all have cloning embargoes in place.

But a couple of months after the UN General Assembly released its stand, South Korean scientists reportedly cloned 11 sick people and then killed their cloned embryos.

What about the US? Well, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act, which Congress passed again in 2003 (it was first passed in 2001), is still sitting in the Senate. The Act bans, among other things, cloning human embryos.

After years of debate, a rival bill, which allows human embryo cloning but bans cloned embryos from being used to initiate pregnancy, was overwhelmingly voted down, 231 to 174. It seems that the Act is once more destined for endless debates in the Senate (which has its own version of the bill) just as it suffered in the House.

The only distinct similarity between the Senate and House versions of the Anti-cloning Act is the penalty: A maximum prison term of 10 years and a maximum fine of $1 million.

So, pending a law, is human cloning outlawed in the US because the UN says so?

Human cloning experiments are going through rough sailing not because of the UN directive (the US doesn’t exactly bow to the UN on its internal policies), but because the sitting President is dead set against it.

Cloning – What Americans Think…

It is President Bush’s firm stand that human life should never be extinguished or exploited to profit another. The American public agrees with him.

In a recent Gallup poll, over 60% were against human embryo cloning as opposed to around 30% that approved. What’s more, the anti-cloning percentage dramatically went up when it was explained that the embryos would be destroyed during research.

So cloning as a crime is a likely reality if a bill gets through within this President’s term. If it continues to sit in the Senate into the next administration, who knows what may happen.

3 Little Known Facts About Cloning

If cloning as a crime is ever submitted for voting in your state, here are a few facts you must consider.

1. Biotechnology Industry Organization has been aggressively pushing for state laws that allow cloned humans to grow past the fetal stage even until birth. The purpose: To harvest tissues for transplanting – so long as they aren’t kept alive after the newborn phase.

2. A number of biotechnologists are currently developing animal clones way past embryo stage. They then harvest animal parts and develop artificial-womb technologies.

3. Anti Cloning doesn’t always mean Anti Stem Cell research. Taking stem cells from adult tissues or umbilical cords isn’t ethically controversial since it doesn’t entail killing human embryos. This kind of stem cell research has repeatedly produced promising results in fighting diseases. Furthermore, many anti-cloning advocates (including legislators) are either afflicted with degenerative diseases or have family members that are.

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Making Cannabis Clones

The art of cloning plants could be the most useful of all ‘indoor’ techniques. Cloning allows growers to make the most of every female plant and it’s a skill that anyone can master with a little practice.

Outdoor growers who clone their plants are able to identify gender early in the season and multiply their female plants during the long vegetation period. With low-powered artificial lighting, a promising female can even be preserved for next year’s outdoor crop.

Due to its common association with indoor growing and hydroponics, cloning might appear to be a complex process. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Just as cannabis seedlings will take advantage of the smallest chance to grow, cuttings will quickly make roots and become healthy small plants if a few conditions are met.

Good cuttings are made from strong, green stalks, preferably the growing shoots of the stem and branches.

If possible, cuttings should be 10-20cm long and a few millimeters thick. Avoid stems that are turning woody or hollow, as these are less likely to root. If the aim is to produce a few strong cuttings from each plant, growers should select 12cm sections of the healthiest top shoots. Larger cuttings have more energy and have a better chance of surviving.

If the aim is to make as many clones as possible, any 5-10cm piece of green stem with a growing shoot and a leaf or two can be used. A 30cm branch can be cut at each internode, making 3-6 clones. Tiny cuttings can also turn into clones, though they may take too long to grow to a decent size after rooting. Nevertheless, pieces of stem 3cm long and 1mm thick can root with vigour in bright, humid conditions.

Before planting, treat cuttings with rooting hormone in powder or gel form.

While a good soak in rooting solution is enough to get many clones started, a final treatment with a rooting aid that clings to their stems will increase success rates.

With a razor blade, make a diagonal cut to remove the last millimeters of stem, then dip the cutting in hormone powder/gel. To encourage rooting, many growers gently scrape the lower stems before dipping. A disposable safety razor is a good way to remove a couple of ultra-thin slices from the stalk.

Place treated cuttings in a moist, airy medium that holds them firmly – expanding peat tablets, a 50/50 mix of soil and perlite, cocoa-fibre or rockwool, if available. Clones have no problem rooting in a small rockwool block, then being transferred to soil.

After planting, outdoor clones are given the natural light cycle. Some growers shade rooting clones during the hottest part of the day, while others adopt a ’survival of the fittest’ attitude. Viable clones will appreciate direct sunlight, and should root quickly.

In hot, dry climates, rooting clones may require a transparent covering to retain humidity. Keep the clones’ medium moist, but not saturated. In good conditions, clones should root in 10-20 days.

Cloning for Sex

The first clone taken from a plant can reveal the parent’s gender with 100% accuracy. It’s easy to reduce the light cycle of cuttings – allow them 12 hours of daylight, then cover them or move them to a dark area. This is much simpler than covering a single branch of a large plant to reveal gender.

When seed-plants reach 30cm, they can yield a cutting or two, which can be given a 12/12 light cycle immediately upon being planted. They will show their gender in 10-14 days, and in many cases they’ll root as well.

It’s fine if these first clones don’t become healthy small plants. Their purpose is to reveal the gender of the parent early in the season, allowing males to be eliminated and all subsequent cuttings to be taken from female plants.

As an added bonus, cloning for sex causes seed-plants to be ‘topped’ early in the season, leaving plenty of time to regenerate a strong double-stem.

Cloning to Multiply

Outdoor growers with plenty of space may clip plants to train them into huge bushes, while balcony growers often cut plants solely to restrict their size.

In both situations, cloning allows extra plants to be made from foliage that is normally discarded.

To keep a balcony plant around 1m by the end of flowering might require quite a lot of pruning. Instead of throwing away over 50% of a female plant during the growing phase, the removed foliage can be made into dozens of copies that plant, all of which will finish under the required height.

Growers who prune plants to make them large and bushy can produce huge numbers of clones. Branches are clipped at regular intervals throughout the vegetative phase to encourage them to split and grow in two directions. As plants increase their size and number of branches, each pruning will yield more cuttings than the last. While this might eventually produce more cuttings than most growers could use, remember that a rooted female clone makes a lovely gift.

Late Cloning

Indoors, cuttings are almost always taken while plants are in the growing stage, as the aim is to preserve a plant in its vegetative state. Outdoors, it is even possible to take clones during the initial weeks of flowering, when the first single flowers begin to show. Cuttings from plants that have begun to flower will often root more quickly than normal clones and should continue blooming at the same rate as the parents.

This means that even in the final, pre-flower trimming (where lower and inner branches with little budding potential are clipped), outdoor growers can clone any viable pieces of stem that are removed from plants.

Every green section of stem with a healthy internode can become a small plant when treated with kindness. Six branches cut from a medium-sized plant in July or August could be turned into 10, 20 or 30 cuttings. Even with a low survival rate of 20%, the result can be a few bonsai flowering plants.

If you’re growing outdoor plants this year and you’ve never made clones, you could try the following experiment just to see how easy it is to produce them, even if you have no particular need to multiply your harvest.

• Fill a few small pots with moist, airy soil.

• With sharp scissors, cut a few growing shoots or minor branches from your plants – nothing that you or the plant will miss – just enough to make ten or twelve cuttings of 5-10cm.

• Give the stems of the cuttings a gentle scrape with the scissors, or your fingernail (some growers use their teeth), and plant a few cuttings firmly in each pot.

• Leave the pots in the sun and make sure they don’t dry out.

• In two or three weeks, you should have a few rooted clones as a result of 20 minutes’ work.

• Any extra care and attention given to future cuttings will greatly improve their survival rate.

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More On Cloning

It was only in the last 250 years that scientists began speaking about chromosomes and genes and the role they play in the way one generation passes its traits on to the next. Only 30 years ago scientists have been able to describe specific genes from one organism and put them in another. But, at the end of XX century the first successful cloning was made (Dolly the sheep).
Today, cloning considered as the most progressive science, as well as the most controversial one. The paper discusses the cloning research from two perspectives: scientific and ethical. Both side of the question is important because cloning is one of the promising scientific fields is still under attack and restrictions which prevent further investigations. The new technology and discoveries in this field allow to find unique and universal remedy for many incurable diseases such as spinal cord injuries, cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, diabetes, etc. The main advantage of cloning is that it becomes possible to treat causes of the diseases before they progress, but still, cloning is prohibited in many countries.
There are three types of cloning: embryo (therapeutic), reproductive and biochemical cloning. Reproductive cloning is a technology used to generate an animal that has the same nuclear DNA as another currently or previously existing animal. In a process called “somatic cell nuclear transfer”, scientists transfer genetic material from the nucleus of a donor adult cell to an egg whose nucleus, and thus its genetic material, has been removed.
Reproductive cloning is expensive and highly inefficient. More than 90% of cloning attempts fail to produce viable offspring. For instance, Japanese researchers examined that cloned mice live in poor health and die early. About a third of the cloned calves born alive have died young, and many of them were abnormally large. Many cloned animals have not lived long enough to generate good data about how clones age. Appearing healthy at a young age unfortunately is not a good indicator of long term survival (Wertz, 2002).
Therapeutic cloning, also called “embryo cloning,” is the production of human embryos for use in research. The goal of this process is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to treat disease. Stem cells are important to biomedical researchers because they can be used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body.
In November 2001, scientists from Advanced Cell Technologies, a biotechnology company in Massachusetts, announced that they had cloned the first human embryos for the purpose of advancing therapeutic research. The results were limited in success. Although this process was carried out with eight eggs, only three began dividing, and only one was able to divide into six cells before stopping” (Mahowald, 2003). This type of cloning gives a lot of perspectives to the science. Therapeutic cloning technology may some day be used in humans to produce whole organs from single cells or to produce healthy cells that can replace damaged cells in degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

The third type of cloning is a biomedical cloning. It means the transfer of a DNA fragment of interest from one organism to a self-replicating genetic element such as a bacterial plasmid. The DNA can then be propagated in a foreign host cell. This technology has been around since the 1970s, and it has become a common practice in molecular biology laboratories today (Wertz, 2002).
The ethical issues are so important because embryonic stem cells are also hard to control, and hard to grow in a reliable way. In 1997 group of scientists led by Dr. Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute (Scotland), cloned the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly. When the scientists cloned, the cloning technique somatic cell nuclear transfer was used. is a fully grown mammal, with her DNA coming from a single cell taken from her mother-egg, which is fused with the mammary cell.
The fused cell then develops into an embryo, which is implanted in a “surrogate” sheep. The embryo grows into a lamb, which is genetically identical to the donor sheep. The announcement of her birth in February 1997 started the current fascination in all things cloned. It was a success, this scientists say that cloning procedure was not perfect. It took more than 277 attempts before “Dolly” was created as a health viable lamb (Campbell, Kind, McWhir, Schnieke, Wilmut, Ian, 1997).
Human cloning is far more complicated, with greater risks and potentials for error. As a result, scientists fear that applying this technique to humans might lead to malformations or diseases in the human clone. There are differences in early development between species that might influence success rate. In sheep and humans, the “embryo divides to between the 8- and 16- cell stage before nuclear genes take control of development, but in mice this transition occurs at the 2 cell stage”. In 1998, a Korean group claimed that they had cloned a human embryo by nuclear transfer but their experiment was terminated at the 4-cell stage and so they had no evidence of successful reprogramming (Friedrich, 2000).
The ethical issues are so important because cells are also hard to control, and hard to grow in a reliable way. “They have “minds” of their own, and are often unstable, producing unexpected results as they divide, or even cancerous growths” (Lopez, 2001).
Still there are a lot of pros and cons concerning cloning. Scientists say that a “human clone” is a time-delayed identical twin of another person. A clone is not an exact replica of the original, but just a much younger identical twin. As with identical twins, the clone and the orignal person will have different fingerprints. Human cloning research would enable doctors to determine the cause of spontaneous abortions, give oncologists an understanding of the rapid cell growth of cancer, allow the use of stem cells to regenerate nerve tissues, and advance work on aging, genetics, and medicines.
Supposed it is unethical to harm or destroy some human beings in order to benefit others. International documents such as the Nuremburg Code, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights reject the use of human beings in experimental research without their informed consent and permit research on incompetent subjects only if there is minimal risk, and therapeutic benefit for “the human subject” (Wertz, 2003).
Scientists are concerned about the medical risks and uncertainty associated with human cloning. One fear is that if a baby is cloned, its chromosomes could match the age of the donor — meaning that a “5-year old would look like a 10-year old and a 10-year would look like a 20-year old, with potential for heart disease and cancer to develop” (Wertz, 2002). As it was stated in testimony against cloning “Human cloning should be banned because it shows grave disrespect for human beings in the very act of creating them. It reduces human procreation to an assembly line, where fellow humans are manufactured to preset specifications and exploited for the sake of traits deemed useful by others” (Doerflinger, 2005).
The legislation of the USA accepted laws aimed to control cloning. Nine states have laws pertaining to human cloning. Therapeutic cloning is more controversial type, which arises disputes and discussions. Conservatives see the perspectives of these types in the possibility: “to create a new life without a father”. Their opponents, liberals, suppose that: “Therapeutic cloning will allow them to create organs that are a perfect match for those in need of a transplant” (Human Reproduction and therapeutic cloning, 2005).
So, two opposing sides hinder human embryonic stem cell research. One side’s key argument is that such research is able to answer many questions doctors currently have about diseases. Due to the damage embryos endure as a result of the process, the opponents suggest that it is immoral and does not care how much the research could benefit society. Both opinion has the right to exist but scientists, government authorities and the public should find the golden middle between their ethical prejudices and possibility to live longer and be free from incurable and chronic diseases. Undoubtedly, the state and medical regulations must exist in order to prevent negative outcomes, but in this very field nobody is able to draw the line between negative and positive, because in many cases fears based on hypothetical theories. And, sometimes the most negative and unpredictable results can lead to epoch-making discovery.
It is possible to say that cloning, as a science, has a great future, but law and legislation should control this “dangerous” sphere of knowledge. Many ethical and moral concerns have arisen over the potential applications of the cloning technology. The technology is still not perfect. Most scientists agree that human cloning poses a serious risk of producing children who are stillborn, unhealthy, severely malformed or disabled. It is also impossible to predict all potential applications of a new technology. Most will be beneficial but all technology can be misused in one way or another. The solution is not to regulate the technology itself but how it is applied.

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Human Cloning – The Child’s View

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