• Human clones are not the same as identical twins.Twins image by Serenitie from Fotolia.com
  
  To some, cloning is the greatest breakthrough in our age. To others, cloning causes great concern. Cloning a human means creating a genetic copy of the donor. While this certainly means an identical appearance, it could also duplicate some preferences such as eating choices. However, personality cannot be cloned. Personality is made up of life experiences, and the clone would have different experiences from its donor. Many possible disadvantages of human cloning exist, but much of the opposition can be expressed in the areas of medical, health and ethical dilemmas.
  
  

Medical Issues

• Medical issues surround the exact cloning of genes and overlap with ethical questions. Scientifically, genes age. Some fear that the genes of the clone would retain the age of the donor's genes. This cannot be avoided. The primary concern is how the genes of a 30-year old donor would manifest in a newborn baby. Ethical concerns arise if manifestations of rapid aging from pre-aged genes appeared in a young clone.
  
  

Health and Humanity

• Health reasons are not to be overlooked. Today's scientists are exploring the infancy of cloning. Animals with severe abnormalities have been born and destroyed. This is very possible with human cloning. As these abnormalities develop, questions about when and how to destroy embryos become relevant. Multiple cloning decreases genetic variation and increases susceptibility to disease. This means broad exposure for diseases that could affect many more than the cloned humans and could cause cataclysmic pandemics.
  
  

Ethical Concerns

• Ethical issues cannot be avoided. With the cloning and birth in 1997 of Dolly, a lamb, opposition flared. Many viable eggs were destroyed or never developed fully in the Dolly experiments. From the original 277 fused eggs, Dolly was the only lamb carried to birth. In 1998 President Clinton condemned human cloning. The successful cloning of a rhesus monkey generated significant concern. The rhesus monkey in utero development almost exactly parallels humans'. Many scientists and theologians question if we have the right to "create" a human being. Moreover, many ask who has the right to answer this question.
  
  

Legal Issues

• Laws regarding human clones are complicated and vary from country to country. In the United States, different state laws exist regarding human cloning. The legal issues regarding human cloning are divided into the categories of therapeutic uses and reproductive uses. Although there have been some attempts to pass federal law against human cloning, as of October 2010, there is no federal law that bans all human cloning.