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Cloning and Orthodox Christian Views

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Cloning and Orthodox Christian Views
1. High failure rate
Cloning animals through somatic cell nuclear transfer is simply inefficient. The success rate ranges from 0.1 percent to 3 percent, which means that for every 1000 tries, only one to 30 clones are made. Or you can look at it as 970 to 999 failures in 1000 tries. That's a lot of effort with only a speck of a return! http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/tech/cloning/cloningrisks/ The risk of producing individuals with developmental anomalies is serious and precludes human cloning for the time being. Producing disabled human clones would give rise to an obligation to seek better understanding of— and potential medical therapies for— the unforeseen consequences that could arise from human cloning.

http://www.ama-assn.org/resources/doc/ethics/report98.pdf

There is a very low success rate. Only 2-3% of trials produce viable subjects and even fewer develop into a functioning organism. If a functioning organism is even produced, they generally have a lower life expectancy and are more suspectable to disease and infection. The proccess is also meticulous and unreliable.

The Orthodox Christian views are that cloning adds a "third party" to the conception of a child. They feel that a cloned child "will not be the product of love, but of scientific procedures." They also question whether or not this new person will have a soul or not. Orthodox Christians also ask "if genetic material from other animals is added to human DNA, would this make the resulting offspring non-human?" Fr. Stanley Samuel Harakas said that "mixing human DNA with animal DNA would be something more than ‘Playing God.’ It would be ‘Playing the Devil.’" Rev. Demetri Demopulos, geneticist and pastor, stated that "Much has been made of cloning humans for medical purposes. This has ranged from making another copy to supply ‘spare parts’ in organ transplantation to creating embryonic cells from mature cells for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Neither is a

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