Free healthcare was once a possibility. Just years ago our administration formed a plan that would allow free healthcare for the nation yet today we find ourselves struggling. People keep dieing of diseases we have
barely funded cures for. The elderly are going without in order to pay for hundreds of dollars in prescriptions. Transplant lists grow page after pageeveryday. Good healthcare benefits are becoming a deal breaker for employees. With all of the millions of dollars spent in healthcare a year, there has to be a better way.
Over the past decades, scientists and bio-engineers have come farther and farther in the field of medical advancements. We have come up with prosthetics, skin grafts, and machines that cure the sick or help those in need. (Cloning Fact Sheet 1) Although we have made many inventions and changed many people’s lives, most of our advancements only aid in more cosmetic issues and the pumps and valves we insert into organs and veins, may only stall the inevitable. The fact is that we have not found cures for cancer or AIDS. We do not have enough donated organs to replace those who are in need but there is something we can do about that.
Scientists have discovered that it is possible to use cloning to clone human tissue and organs. Today three different kinds of cloning have been discovered: Recombinant DNA technology or DNA cloning, reproductive cloning, and therapeutic cloning. Recombinant DNA technology is practically the coping of a gene and/ or chromosomes.
Reproductive cloning is the duplication of an animal buy implanting genetic material into an adult cell whose nucleus has been removed. Then either chemical or electric stimulation causes the cell to actually split forming an embryo, which is then implanted into the female until birth. In this process the animal created is not identical of the donor animal. This could be used to clone animals around the world where livestock may have died off and to create food. Therapeutic cloning is also referred to as “embryo cloning” and is the production of human embryos to harvest the stem cells. The harvesting of stem cells is where the development of tissue could be produced and used medically.
This sort of technology could be the most beneficial. It could easily save lives and cure disease.
According to Gralla, this process of cloning could also clone organs for transplants, which might put an end to the many people who lay around suffering while waiting to be moved up a space or two on a list that they could die before ever getting their chance. (148)
Though the technology is far from being perfected, scientists have successfully cloned cells and animals. The very cloning of animals could be used to end starvation around the world. The loss of livestock would no longer ruin a family.
If the government were to give more money to the scientists to possible perfect the cloning of cells, we could do so much to help people. Though there are many good things about cloning, organ cloning specifically, there are many drawbacks. Though there have been many documented successes in cloning, Dolly was one success out of many, many tries. 90% of clone attempts fail, not to mention the great expense of cloning. Along with the low efficiency of a perfect clone created with each time, those clones have a very low immune system
and are more susceptible to disease and infection. Many develop tumors and many other disorders. Many of the cloned animals around the world died very young and were born at abnormal sizes but if funded, scientists could keep working to perfect the technology that could allow a perfect clone of a cell, each time. (Brown 368)
The cost of keeping a person on life support costs thousands of dollars. The cost oh chemotherapy and dialysis machines are too great. Finding insurance that will cover even a fourth of a terminally ill person is rare. Prescriptions and experimental drugs are offered to possibly cure or delay sickness but many of the things found to work, are only available to those with the money to spend. There are millions of poverty stricken people who will die because they cannot afford to go to the hospital or who know there is no point in going to the hospital because they know they will die because they have no money for medicine and treatment.
Cloning could produce viable organs for those on transplant lists and shorten their stay in hospitals and use of expensive machines and medicines. Cloning could produce healthy tissue that could maybe cure cancer and tumors, which would keep patients off of chemotherapy,which takes a terrible toll on the body, even with our modern medicine.
Over all, the funding and advancement of cloning can only help us. There are many positive things it could do and the fist costs of developing it will ultimately save our country in healthcare. With these medical advancements in place, the healthcare deficit will decrease greatly. And maybe when we do perfect the process to where we produce healthy cells and tissue each time, we could expand this research into other countries and possibly put and end to terminal sickness and give all people, no matter of social or economical standings, a chance to live full and healthy lives.