Take pet cloning, for example. On the surface, it may appear to be a harmless way for a pet owner to preserve their beloved pet. Dig a little deeper though, and the moral ambiguities abound. First off, the cloned pet will never be exactly the same as the source pet. While the genetics will be identical, environmental factors will differ. Someone hoping to reclaim all of Fido's nostalgic personality quirks will certainly feel cheated.
There's also considerable work that needs to be done in perfecting the cloning process. A quick Wikipedia search reveals that in cloning the first commercial pet cat, cloning firm Genetics Savings and Clone went through many kittens before finding one that survived more than two months. Is this high rate of failure fair to the animals that die young? Even the few that survive more than a few months most likely will be plagued with potential health problems. In the end, cloning personal pets seems like a technology we'd be better off without. With the thousands of animals waiting for adoption in shelters, and many more strays that remain, how can we justify spending so much to reclaim what is, after all, a flawed memory?
Soon we won't be far off from the future presented in "The 6th Day," the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi film that now seems more prescient than ever. In the film, human cloning is outlawed while pet cloning services are commonplace. Just because human cloning is outlawed, though, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist on the black market. We can expect the same sorts of issues when human cloning becomes a reality. Is it justified for the parents to clone a dying child? If given the same name as the original child, is the clone meant to take over the life of the original? Is individuality something robbed from clones? These complexities are likely to ensure that human cloning will never become legal in our future. Just as in the film, however, outlawing cloning will only push it underground.
If you couldn't tell, I have significant issues with pet and human cloning. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm entirely pessimistic when it comes to biotechnology. As our understanding of genetics progresses, I am certain we'll see incredible medical feats, but that type of advancement will take time.
Even sooner than that, we may see a new sort of flu vaccine geared to combat a potential avian flu pandemic. With around $7 billion in emergency federal funding allocated for an avian flu solution, researchers are working overtime to be the first to release an effective and easily deployable vaccine. Deployment is the biggest problem; manufacturing a typical flu vaccine currently takes about six months ("How to Stop a Pandemic," Popular Science, Jan. 2006). If this research bears fruit, we will eventually be able to mass-produce vaccines more quickly.
It has been recently shown that this new strain of avian flu isn't all that different from the one responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic-that we have, thus far, been able to prevent another such outbreak testifies to our progress. I only hope that in making further technological advances, we look before we leap.