I was recently asked in a long airplane conversation what I felt to be the benefits of human cloning. The questioner in seat 10B further went on to insist that there were all kind of benefits of having full bodied human clones running about doing errands and making shenanigans not unlike any Hollywood movie ever containing clones. After listening to mind numbingly backwards arguments backed with rebuttals to my counter arguments such as “so?”, and “but it would be so awesome!”, I soon gave up and began typing one thought out response. A single response without any super advanced terms, or moral analogies, nor philosophic thesis, or even detailed findings of the past 15 or so years made in the field of human genetics. I made an attempt at a layman's thesis.
The only real advantage to human cloning is use as a medical stockpile. Essentially, the best analogy for this use is restoring a classic car, wherein the classic car is yourself. After 50 or so years, parts wear out, and need replacing. However, as we all know, tissue rejection is a major barrier in transplantation; an obstacle overcome through cloning. By having an exact copy of yourself, you essentially have an exact copy of yourself. While the clone would of course have to be 18 years or thereabout, if not older for successful transplantation into an aging adult for most organs to function properly (especially the lungs, heart, and reproductive organs), the necessity of a clone would be more of an insurance than a quick fix. A person would have a clone of themselves made at the time of their birth in case they should need any organs by the age of 40, and additionally, another clone produced around the age of twenty, and again every twenty years to insure a steady supply of young, healthy organs. The usefulness of a clone goes beyond organs into tissues and fluids, however, most of these are easily enough transplanted from other individuals, but a comfort to the owner, no less.
However, this benefit is far outweighed by the morality of the use of another human being as nothing more than an organ bank. The fact that their only purpose in living would be to give their life (once enough vital organs had been extracted) to prolong your own. This may lead to a sort of sub-human class of organ farms wandering hopelessly through life waiting to be harvested. However, this is overcome in one of two ways; first, make the clone inhuman, of second, just skip the human part altogether.
The first resolution would be the production of a human without any semblance of what makes a person human, which to most people is defined by the abilities embued upon us by our brains. Simple solution: subtract mental capacity until the public no longer considers the organism to be human. This would be most easily be done in the manipulation of the zygote, through the subtraction of certain genes that code for a large cerebral cortex, for instance, or even reducing the brain further until only the reptilian sectors (also known as the R complex), or mid and hind brain regions are left in tact. By doing this, only the systems which are responsible for basic bodily functions such as digestion and the circulation of blood, could be managed, however, the individual would be left literally "deaf, blind, and dumb", not to mention quite a few more imparements. This work could be easily done by studying available genetic material from birthed mutant humans that are missing genes that result in brain malfunction, such as microcephallic individuals, and then just pushing the retardation a bit further by combining maladies until the clone is not only sub-human, but sub-mammalian in intelligence. This would equate the slaughter of the clone to nothing more than stomping on a lizard, which is much more acceptable than chopping the head off of a living human, in western civilization, at least.
The second option, which is contemporarily known as organ farming, involves growing clones of individual organs. The most viable way, as it is seen today, it to clone the individual cells of an organ, arrange them in the general shape of the organ, and then bathing the pile of cells in stem cells. The stem cells allow the heap to almost magically gain function, as when the stem cells are introduced to the mature cells, the stem cells begin to specialize, and fill in the gaps in organs such as the liver, kidneys, or even the heart someday.
This is a single aspect of the benefits of human cloning, and people may argue for other points, most of which are outweighed by the threat of overpopulating the Earth, which humans are doing just splendidly the old fashioned way. The use of human clones as a medical insurance is to date one of the most credible purposes of human cloning to date, with the most easily corrected moral detractions that can in fact be repaired with modern technology once cloning is perfected (which most perceive to be unlocking the secrets behind telomeres and "suicide genes"). The only certainty in this matter, in fact, will be that there will certainly be uncertainty among certain groups, who will most likely prevent the procedure from ever taking place out of ignorance and utter fear and abhorrence of knowledge.
