Mary Shelleys Cloning essays

Mary Shelley's Cloning essays If we look at Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, cloning and the moral issues surrounding it become prevalent. The creature in the novel was in essence and by definition a human clone. The real monster in the story, though, was doctor Frankenstein himself. He attempts to do humanity a service by searching for a way to cheat death and perpetuate life. In doing so, the doctor creates a being that ironically takes life away. Shelleys position on cloning is that the possible benefits are not positive enough to overcome the bad and, thus, that cloning is negative in practice. Her opinion is only one out of many. There are a great many positives that cold also come out of cloning as well. A clone is a replication of an individual in a select species that is created asexually. The first question you have to answer when dealing with human cloning is What is a human? To be human and have the characteristics of the species are the ultimate goals for a clone. A human being is a creature who thinks on a higher level than other animals. The thing that separates us as humans from other animals is the ability to reason. The capacity to learn and differentiate between any number of things and analyze that same information is a defining characteristic of reasoning. If a clone is created asexually, the question that stems from this creation becomes, Is this thing human? Although on a much higher level of thought than animals, people still have instinctual reactions toward everything. Mankind is afraid of the things it does not know. Being that we do not know what exactly a clone will be in our society or if it will be the same as the rest of us, it is understandable that people, with this innate feeling of anxiety, fear clones. This feeling could explain our continual search for all the answers to the questions of life, philosophy, and the arts. We also get a sense that we as humans nee...