Ethical implications

Advocates of human therapeutic cloning believe the practice could provide genetically identical cells for regenerative medicine, and tissues and organs for transplantation. Such cells, tissues and organs would neither trigger an immune response nor require the use of immunosuppressive drugs. Both basic research and therapeutic development for serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, as well as improvements in burn treatment and reconstructive and cosmetic surgery, are areas that might benefit from such new technology.[3] New York University bioethicist Jacob M. Appel has argued that "children cloned for therapeutic purposes" such as "to donate bone marrow to a sibling with leukemia" might someday be viewed as heroes.[4] --- <like the book called "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult>

Proponents claim that human reproductive cloning also would produce benefits. Severino Antinori and Panos Zavos hope to create a fertility treatment that allows parents who are both infertile to have children with at least some of their DNA in their offspring.[5]

Some scientists, including Dr. Richard Seed, suggest that human cloning might obviate the human aging process.[6] Dr. Preston Estep has suggested the terms "replacement cloning" to describe the generation of a clone of a previously living person, and "persistence cloning" to describe the production of a cloned body for the purpose of obviating aging, although he maintains that such procedures currently should be considered science fiction.[citation needed]

In Aubrey de Gray's proposed SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), one of the considered options to repair the cell depletion related to cellular senescence is to grow replacement tissues from stem cells harvested from a cloned embryo.

Opponents of human cloning argue that the process will likely lead to severely disabled children. For example, bioethicist Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center argues that "it is absolutely inevitable that groups are going to try to clone a human being. But they are going to create a lot of dead and dying babies along the way."[7] ie: because of the difficulty of cloning any living animal, it is likely that there would be a great number of failures in the creation of a living human clone, such as clones without viable immune systems or other gross genetic failures. - Wiki