Human Body Transplants: Cloning as a Future Prospect - Thesis Example

The paper next investigates all other aspects and prospects that may influence the availability of transplantable organs, tissues, and cells in the future. This investigation process includes cloning as a whole. All ethical and scientific aspects are also explored. In respect of cloning the paper finds that somatic cell nuclear transfer can only be allowed in animals and, as such, transplantable organs, tissues and cells can only be made available in the future from animal bodies like that of pigs, which seem to be the most compatible animals to humans. This process is known as xenotransplantation.

In the process of investigating the other aspects and possibilities, the paper finds that xenotransplantation via therapeutic and reproductive cloning cannot be the only means to solve the problem of the present organ shortage. Instead, the paper finds that there is a large unutilized potential to increase cadaveric and living donations and this is recommended as a future enhanced source. Of the four possible sources listed in the conclusion, the other two are bioartificial organs, tissues, and cells made available through more advanced techniques and the same transplantable parts made available through research in adult stem cells. The paper notes that there is much constriction in the usage of human embryos and believes that such objections have both scientific and another basis. This is so because altering genetic material that has been put together over millions of years of evolution is highly complicated and the task should be approached with extreme caution. So the paper has been so and has, instead provided conventional means to supplement the more innovative ones like cloning, stem cell therapy, and artificiality to alleviate organ, tissue, and cell shortage in the future. 

The purpose of the paper, as set out in the abstract, is to investigate to what extent the recently-developing and progressive technology of cloning can be helpful in generating organs and tissues for transplantation to needy human recipients. Many disorders of the human body, such as certain congenital conditions, cancer, trauma, infection, inflammation, and other conditions can lead to organ damage and failure and the need for reconstruction. As is stated later on in the paper the number of persons with such organ reconstruction needs exceeds by a large margin the number of organs available. Consequently, this results in unnecessary deaths each year, both in the United States as well as elsewhere in the world. At a period in human history when it seems that most things are possible this is considered appalling. Regenerative medicine together with tissue engineering strives to return the form and function of these failed organs. Therapeutic cloning, one of all the cloning technologies available today, has great potential to become a permanent part of regenerative medicine by becoming a constant source of transplantable cells that can restore both form and function of the original sets of cells that constituted the failed organ or tissue (Koh and Atala, 2004). Nevertheless, it must be noted here that therapeutic cloning in the true sense of using human embryos is unallowable under ethical considerations now or in the future as it implies the destruction of an embryo, constituted to be the destruction of potential human life. Then how can therapeutic cloning be of any help in supplying organs and tissues to be used for transplantation? There is another possibility under therapeutic cloning.