IntroductionWe have reached a point in human history in which everyone one of us is

capable of choosing their own point of view over many different topics. We have the possibility of doing a deep research over any single topic of our interest at the tip of our fingers. Literally, you just need to grab your computer, tablet or smartphone and just google it. No big loss of time, no huge spending of money. Simply taking a few minutes into it and you can almost consider yourself an expert.

Cloning is just of these topics. It will be an extreme surprise to us, the editors, if you read any of the opinions which are expressed in this magazine for the first time. It might seem like a loss to give a chance to our magazine, right? Wrong! As we said, you might have seen something alike previously, but it is the personal touch given in each article that makes it valuable and worth reading. It's the personality and backgrounds of each author, put into the article, that makes it special.

Furthermore, in the process of making this magazine, we did our best towards choosing articles which are both concise, worth reading and with a vocabulary easy to understand to anyone who cares to read.In the following pages you will find an article in favor of cloning, an article stating the ethical issue of approving cloning and, to conclude, an article made by ourselves, with our personal opinions, taking into consideration the articles expressed earlier.

So, what are you waiting for? Take a leap of faith and discover the depth of cloning, in the easiest way possible.

The Editors,

Afonso Amorim

Afonso Mendes

João Vieira

José Ramos

Human Cloning developments raise hopes for new treatments

By: Robin McKie, science editor

Lorraine Barnes suffered a heart attack in 2005 and has lived with the

consequences – extreme exhaustion and breathlessness – ever since. "I was separated from my husband and so my children, Charlotte and James, had to grow up overnight because suddenly they were caring for me," she says.

Charlotte agrees: "It turns your world upside down. I worry about my mum day and night, 24/7."

Heart failure leaves Barnes, 49, "drowning and gasping for air", she says. What really preys on her mind, though, is not her present difficulty but her future. "It scares me, as obviously I want to be around to see my children grow up."

There is no cure for heart failure, the aftermath of a heart attack, and the condition is common. Every seven minutes a person has a heart attack in the UK, and some victims are left so weakened they can hardly walk a few metres.

It's a grim scenario. But the prospects for patients like Barnes last week took a dramatic turn for the better when it was revealed that human cloning has been used for the first time to create embryonic stem cells from which new tissue – genetically identical to a patient's own cells – could be grown.

Scientists have been working on such techniques (see box) for some time but their work has been hampered by the difficulties involved in cloning human cells in the laboratory. But the team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, got around this problem. By adding caffeine to cell cultures, their outputs were transformed. "We were able to produce one embryonic stem cell line using just two human eggs, which would make this approach practical for widespread therapeutic use," said Mitalipov.

The development was hailed as a major boost for patients such as Barnes, who might benefit from tissue transplants – and not just heart attack patients but those suffering from diabetes, Parkinson's disease and other conditions.

But the announcement was also greeted with horror. "Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos," said David King of Human Genetics Alert. "It is imperative we create an international ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this."

Several tabloid newspapers also carried banner headlines warning of the human cloning "danger". Such reactions have a familiar ring. When the cloning of Dolly the Sheep was revealed in 1997 there was an outpouring of hysteria about the prospect of multiple Saddam Husseins being created in laboratories.

"At the time the chances of these horrors occurring – when scientists had not even created a single clone of a human cell – were remote," said physiologist Professor Colin Blakemore of Oxford University. "Not that this worried the alarmists. The crucial point is that we should have spent the intervening time thinking about how we should react sensibly to the concept of a human clone when it does become possible. We have not done that and, although the science is still far off, it is

getting closer. We need to ask, carefully and calmly: under what circumstances would we tolerate the creation of a human clone?"

At present such a creation is banned in Britain. No human embryo created by cloning techniques is allowed to develop beyond 14 days. "The research is very tightly regulated and I think there is little chance of a rogue laboratory creating a human clone," said James Lawford Davies, a lawyer who specialises in health sciences. "However, many US states which, ironically, banned therapeutic cloning work because of their strong anti-abortion stances have laws that would permit human clones to develop into foetuses."

Experts such as Professor John Harris, director of Manchester University's Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, see positive benefits in reproductive cloning which could have a place in society. He said: "If you take a healthy adult's DNA and use it to create a new person – by cloning – you are essentially using a tried and tested genome, one that has worked well for several decades for the donor. By contrast, a child born naturally has an 8% chance of succumbing to a serious genetic abnormality because of the random selection of their DNA. You can avoid that with a clone."

In fact, most arguments against human cloning are foolish, said Harris, adding: "It could be used in medically helpful ways. If a couple find they are carriers of harmful, possibly fatal recessive genetic illnesses, there is a one in four chance they will produce a child who will die of that condition. That is a big risk. An alternative would be to clone one of the parents. If you did that, then you would know you were producing a child who would be unaffected by that illness in later life.

"Or consider the example of a single woman who wants a child. She prefers the idea of using all her own DNA to the idea of accepting 50% from a stranger. But because we ban human cloning she would be forced to accept DNA from a stranger and have to mother 'his child'. I think that is ethically questionable. Just after Dolly the Sheep was born, Unesco announced a ban on human cloning. I think that was a mistake."

This point was backed by Blakemore. He said: "Many people react with horror at the thought of a human clone, yet three out of every 1,000 babies born today are clones – in the form of identical twins. These twins share not just the same DNA but have grown up in the same uterus and have had the same parenting – features that only intensify their similarities. Society is quite happy about this situation, it appears, but seems to find it odd when talking about cloning."

However, a note of caution was sounded by Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly the Sheep. He said: "The new work may encourage some people to attempt human reproductive cloning but the general experience is that it still results in late foetal loss and the birth of abnormal offspring." It would be cruel to cause this in humans until techniques had been vastly improved, he added.

However, most scientists see Mitalipov's work as encouraging. If nothing else, the prospects for Lorraine Barnes – and countless other patients whose lives could be transformed by transplants – have greatly improved in the long term.

Human cloning likely possible though unethical, experts sayBy: Rachael Rettner, LiveScience Senior Writer

The news that researchers have used cloning to make human embryos for the

purpose of producing stem cells may have some people wondering if it would ever be possible to clone a person.

Although it would be unethical, experts say it is likely biologically possible to clone a human being. But even putting ethics aside, the sheer amount of resources needed to do it is a significant barrier.

Since the 1950s when researchers cloned a frog, scientists have cloned dozens of animal species, including mice, cats, sheep, pigs and cows.

In each case, researchers encountered problems that needed to be overcome with trial and error, said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at the biotech company Advanced Cell Technology, which works on cell therapies for human diseases, and has cloned animals.

With mice, researchers were able to use thousands of eggs, and conduct many experiments, to work out these problems, Lanza said. "It’s a numbers game," he said.

But with primates, eggs are a very precious resource, and it is not easy to acquire them to conduct experiments, Lanza said.

In addition, researchers can't simply apply what they've learned from cloning mice or cows to cloning people.

For instance, cloning an animal requires that researchers first remove the nucleus of an egg cell. When researchers do this, they also remove proteins that are essential to help cells divide, Lanza said. In mice, this isn't a problem, because the embryo that is ultimately created is able to make these proteins again. But primates aren't able to do this, and researchers think it may be one reason that attempts to clone monkeys have failed, Lanza said. [See How Stem Cell Cloning Works (Infographic)]

What's more, cloned animals often have different kinds of genetic abnormalities that can prevent embryo implantation in a uterus, or cause the fetus to spontaneously abort, or the animal to die shortly after birth, Lanza said.

These abnormalities are common because cloned embryos have just one parent rather than two, which means that a molecular process known as "imprinting" does not occur properly in cloned embryos, Lanza said. Imprinting takes place during embryo development, and selectively silences certain genes from one parent or the other.

Problems with imprinting can result in extremely large placentas, which ultimately leads to problems with blood flow for the fetus, Lanza said. In one experiment, Lanza and colleagues cloned a species of cattle called banteng, and it was born at twice the size of a normal banteng. It had to be euthanized, Lanza said.

The extremely high rate of death, and the risk of developmental abnormalities from cloning makes cloning people unethical, Lanza said.

"It's like sending your baby up in a rocket knowing there's a 50-50 chance it's going to blow up. It's grossly unethical," Lanza said.

A personal touchBy: Afonso Mendes, Afonso Amorim, João Vieira & Bernardo Ramos

So here is our take on the matter. In the previously articles, multiple arguments against and in favor of cloning were shown.

As a group, we have come to an agreement on our own opinion of cloning.

Now the first aspect to take into consideration, is the nature of the problem: To clone or not to clone?

At first, it might seem like a simple, yes or no question, but in fact, there is a lot more to it.

First we need to consider the entire spectrum of the activity known as cloning. Cloning is the act of producing a clone.

A clone is a cell, group of cells, or organism that is descended from and genetically identical to a single common ancestor, such as a bacterial colony whose members arose from a single original cell. To put it simply, if you made a clone of yourself, he would grow to be identical to you.

Given all of this, cloning isn’t constricted to producing an entire being. Cloning can be used to create stem cells, which would probably be more useful than a full-fledged clone.

Stem cells, as mentioned previously, can be used to repair otherwise unrepairable tissues and organs.

So here is what we are against:

We are, in general, strongly against the act of producing a cloned human (or even animal). Why? Great question!

We just believe it’s unethical, and represents too great a risk to not only the clone, but to mankind. This is due to amount of unknown about cloning.

For example, the clone, even if derived from the cells of a healthy and well-structured human, might be born with abnormalities, and have a deformed body, not to mention all the problems related to the aging process.

It can be compared to an HIV positive mother having a child, fully knowing that the child will probably be born with the virus. Both this example and cloning are, therefore, unethical.

Also, the cost of cloning an entire human being would be astronomical, and we have no certainties that it would work according to plan.

What we are in favor of:

We discussed two main branches of cloning. Full on cloning, and the use of stem cells. We do agree on the use of cloning for the purpose of stem cell research, as it doesn’t pose any kind of ethical problem, since the procedure doesn’t actually get to the point of creating a fetus.

It also brings great benefits to the human race, a way to cure most known diseases. It can replace, for example, a damaged spinal medulla, which causes paraplegia. The spinal medulla is a tissue that does not regenerate.

So, by using stem cells, it would be possible to give paraplegic people the ability to walk once again. This is an exciting goal, and it is why we are so encouraging of stem cell research.

So, let us reformulate the problem:

To what point, is cloning acceptable?

Our answer to that, is the following: Cloning is acceptable if used for the benefits of humanity, and only as long as it doesn’t affect someone, be it the clone, or the DNA giver.

We believe that cloning is, without the shadow of a doubt, the future of genetic and biological engineering.

If developed, it is likely to the bring the next era in modern medicine, as it will become a fighting chance against cancer, HIV, Ebola, Influenza and other viruses alike.

We also believe there are many Nobel prizes in store for those who make significant advances in the use of cloning towards the benefits of mankind.

But let’s not give you a misleading idea of what we are doing. We are not trying to force onto you our opinion, but merely aiding in the construction of your own.

By giving you the needed information about the topic, we hope to clear and open minds of readers towards it.

Let us sum up what you’ve read:

In this magazine, we have discussed the topic of cloning, most importantly, the dos and don’ts, whether it is acceptable, beneficial, or not.

We have presented you with different arguments in favor and against, coming from sources from all around the world, and also our own take on it.

Some final words:

Development in this departure will fix many of our biological and physiological flaws, ultimately bringing us closer to perfection, as a species.

Cloning will open many doors, not only for itself, but the altering of the human genome.

For example, we could use the gene that makes lizards have the ability to regenerate entire organs and limbs and introduce to our own DNA, or even the gene that cockroaches possess that makes them nearly immune to residual radiation.

This last example would be lifesaving in the case of a nuclear war.

So, we hope to have inspired you to think about this very important topic, and make you aware of what it brings to the table.