Could You Clone a Person? And If You Could, Should You?

Here’s a strange fact: you already have a clone. Well, not you exactly, but if you have an identical twin, you share something remarkable. Identical twins are natural clones—they start from the same fertilized egg and end up with the same DNA. For as long as humans have existed, nature has been doing something that, until recently, we thought was impossible to do in a lab.

In 1996, a sheep named Dolly changed everything. Scientists in Scotland took a single cell from the udder of a six-year-old sheep, pulled out its nucleus (the part that contains most of the DNA), and put it into an egg cell from another sheep—an egg that had its own nucleus removed. They zapped it with electricity to get it to start dividing, and a few months later, Dolly was born. She had the white face of the sheep who donated the udder cell, not the black face of the sheep who donated the egg. Dolly was, for all practical purposes, a genetic copy.

This was a huge deal because scientists had believed that once a cell became specialized—say, a skin cell or a liver cell—it stayed that way forever. You couldn’t turn it back into something that could grow into a whole new organism. Dolly proved them wrong.

And once you can do it with sheep, people start wondering: could we do it with humans? And should we?

Two Very Different Uses

When people talk about cloning, they’re usually talking about two very different things. Both start with the same technique (called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT for short), but they go in completely opposite directions.

Therapeutic cloning (also called research cloning) is about creating embryos to get stem cells—cells that can turn into any other kind of cell in the body. Scientists hope these cells could be used to repair damaged hearts, treat diabetes, or fix spinal cord injuries. The embryo is never implanted into a uterus. It’s created in a dish, used for research, and destroyed.

Reproductive cloning is about creating a baby—a living person who would be a genetic copy of someone else. This is what most people think of when they hear “cloning.” It’s also what almost everyone, including most scientists, agrees we should not do right now.

The disagreements come when you start asking harder questions. Is it ever okay to create and destroy human embryos for research? What if reproductive cloning became safe—would it be okay then? What’s actually wrong with making a genetic copy of a person, anyway?

The Embryo Question

The most heated argument about cloning for research is really an argument about something even more basic: what is a human embryo, and what do we owe it?

Some people believe that from the moment of conception, an embryo is a person with the same rights as you or me. If you believe this, then creating an embryo just to destroy it for its stem cells is a terrible thing to do—even if that research could save many lives.

Other people believe that an early embryo—just a cluster of cells smaller than the dot on this letter “i”—has no more moral status than any other group of human cells. From this view, using embryos for research that could cure diseases isn’t just permitted; it’s something we have a moral duty to do.

Many people land somewhere in between. They think the early embryo deserves some respect—not the same as a person, but more than an ordinary cell. This middle view leads to tricky questions. For example: is it okay to use embryos that would be thrown away anyway (leftover from fertility treatments) but not okay to create new embryos just for research? Some say yes, because creating embryos just to use them treats them as tools. Others say no, because if killing embryos is wrong, it doesn’t matter where they came from.

A few thinkers have even argued the opposite: that cloned embryos are less morally problematic than regular ones, because they can’t develop into a baby on their own. They suggest we shouldn’t even call them embryos—maybe “clonotes” or “ovasomes” instead.

Nobody has settled this debate. It’s still very much alive.

Why Would Anyone Want to Clone a Person?

If we set aside the safety worries for a moment (and there are many), some people think reproductive cloning could be a good thing.

The main argument is about helping people have children. Some people can’t have a child who’s genetically related to them. Cloning would offer a way. Same-sex couples, for example, could have a child genetically related to one of them without needing a sperm or egg donor. Parents who have lost a child might want to create a “replacement.” People who carry serious genetic diseases might prefer to clone themselves rather than risk passing those genes on through normal reproduction.

Some defenders of cloning go further. They say cloning would let parents choose desirable genomes for their children—a kind of genetic head start. Instead of leaving your child’s genetic makeup to the lottery of sexual reproduction, you could pick a genome that’s already proven to produce good health, long life, or other desirable traits.

And then there’s the “savior sibling” scenario. Imagine your older child is dying of a disease that could be treated with stem cells from umbilical cord blood. You could create a cloned child who’s a perfect tissue match for the sick sibling, use the cord blood to save them, and raise both children. (This has already been done with IVF and genetic testing, not cloning—so it’s not science fiction.)

The Creepy Part

For most people, the idea of cloning a human feels wrong even if they can’t quite say why. Philosophers have tried to put their finger on that feeling.

One worry is about identity and individuality. If you’re a clone, are you still you? Some people fear that clones would feel like copies—like someone else’s life was being lived again through them. Parents might have impossible expectations (“you’re going to be just like your genetic mother—she was a brilliant pianist!”). People might constantly compare the clone to the original. The President’s Council on Bioethics in the US wrote that being genetically unique is “an emblem of independence and individuality.”

But critics of this worry point to identical twins. Twins have the same DNA, and nobody thinks they’re not individuals. They have different personalities, different lives, different senses of who they are. A clone would be even more different from the original than a twin is, because they’d grow up in a different time, with different parents, different experiences. So why would a clone’s identity be threatened?

The reply is that cloning is different from twinning in important ways. A clone would be a “delayed twin”—born years or decades after the original. The original might have already lived a famous life, creating a huge shadow to live in. And unlike twins, who grow up together as equals, a clone child might have a parent who is also their genetic original—a strange and potentially suffocating relationship. The child might feel like their life has already been lived, or that they’re expected to live it again.

Another worry is about treating people as tools. Some parents might want a clone for purely selfish reasons—to show off, to have a “designer child,” to replace a dead loved one, to provide spare organs for a sick sibling. The worry is that cloned children would be treated as objects or commodities rather than as people with their own lives to live.

Defenders of cloning respond that parents have children for all sorts of reasons, many of them selfish. What matters is how you treat the child once it exists, not your original motive for having it. Lots of people have children for “instrumental” reasons—to carry on the family name, to have someone to care for them in old age—and nobody thinks those children are being treated merely as tools, as long as they’re loved and cared for.

The Safety Problem

Here’s something almost everyone agrees on: right now, reproductive cloning would be dangerous. In animals, clones have high rates of miscarriages, stillbirths, and developmental problems. There are concerns about premature aging (clones might inherit shortened telomeres—the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that get shorter as we age). We just don’t understand the process well enough to risk it in humans.

Most people think this is enough reason to ban human reproductive cloning, at least for now. But what if the technology improves? What if, in the future, cloning became as safe as IVF—or even safer than natural reproduction? Would it be wrong then?

Some philosophers say yes, it would still be wrong. Others say no—and a few even argue that if cloning became safer than natural reproduction, we might have a duty to use it, just as we have a duty to choose the safest car seat for our child.

The Even Weirder Questions

If you follow the cloning debate long enough, you start bumping into some genuinely strange questions.

What about family relationships? If a woman clones herself, the resulting child would be her genetic twin, not her daughter. The child’s genetic mother would actually be the clone’s grandmother. Would this be confusing for everyone involved? Or would it just be a new way of doing family, like how adoption and IVF have already changed what “family” means?

What about human dignity? The United Nations has declared that reproductive cloning is “contrary to human dignity.” But what does that mean, exactly? Whose dignity is violated? The clone’s? Society’s? And if cloning violates dignity, does that mean identical twins are a threat to dignity too? (Some societies in the past did think so, but most don’t today.)

Would cloning make us more prejudiced? Some worry that clones would face discrimination—a kind of “clonism.” But if we banned cloning because people might be prejudiced against clones, wouldn’t that be like banning a mixed-race couple from having children because some people are racist? Most people think the right response to prejudice is to fight the prejudice, not to avoid doing things that might trigger it.

Where Things Stand

As of now, no human has been cloned for reproduction. It’s illegal in many countries. The science is still too risky, and the ethical debates are far from settled.

But the questions keep coming up. As stem cell research advances, as scientists get better at manipulating cells, as reproductive technology pushes into new territory—the question of whether we should do what we can do never goes away.

Maybe the strangest thing about cloning is how it forces us to think about what makes someone a unique individual. If someone made a perfect genetic copy of you—same DNA, same potential—would that person be you? No, obviously not. They’d have different memories, different experiences, different relationships. They’d be their own person.

But then… what does make you you? If it’s not your DNA, what is it?

That’s the kind of question philosophy keeps asking, and cloning just makes it more urgent.

Appendix: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)	The technique scientists use to create a clone by putting the nucleus of a body cell into an egg cell that has had its own nucleus removed
Reproductive cloning	Creating a clone with the goal of bringing a baby to birth
Therapeutic cloning (research cloning)	Creating a clone embryo to get stem cells for research, not for reproduction
Stem cells	Cells that can develop into many different types of cells, which is why they’re valuable for medical research
Moral status	A way of talking about whether something deserves moral consideration and protection—a rock has none, a person has a lot, and embryos are somewhere in between (but where?)
Genetic determinism	The false belief that our genes completely determine who we become—a mistake that makes people worry too much about cloning
Human dignity	A vague but powerful idea that cloning somehow violates; critics say nobody can agree on what it actually means

Key People

Ian Wilmut – The Scottish scientist who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, proving that cloning mammals was possible
Leon Kass – An American bioethicist who argued strongly against cloning, worried it threatened human dignity and individuality
John Harris – A British philosopher who defended cloning as an expansion of reproductive freedom and argued that worries about identity are overblown
Michael Sandel – An American political philosopher who worried that cloning and other genetic technologies would lead to “hyper-parenting” and a society that can’t accept children as they are

Things to Think About

If identical twins are natural clones and we don’t think there’s anything wrong with them, why do so many people feel uneasy about creating clones in a lab? Is the unease just based on misunderstanding, or is there a real difference?
Imagine you were a clone of one of your parents. Would you feel your identity was threatened? Would you feel like you were expected to live their life over again? Or would you just be yourself, like anyone else?
Suppose reproductive cloning became perfectly safe—no more risky than natural pregnancy. Would it be okay then? Or is there something about cloning itself that’s wrong, regardless of safety?
Here’s a harder one: if creating and destroying embryos is wrong because embryos are potential people, does that mean we should also ban birth control, which prevents potential people from existing? (Most people think there’s a difference, but explaining exactly what it is turns out to be surprisingly difficult.)

Where This Shows Up

In medicine right now: Scientists are working on ways to create stem cells without using embryos at all (induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs), which avoids many of the ethical problems while keeping the potential benefits
In pet cloning: You can already pay companies to clone your dead cat or dog. It’s expensive and controversial, and it’s happening right now.
In science fiction: Movies like The Island, Never Let Me Go, and Multiplicity explore different worries about cloning—from organ harvesting to identity confusion to what happens when you make too many copies
In debates about reproductive technology: The same arguments about whether parents should be allowed to choose their children’s traits show up in discussions about IVF, genetic testing, and gene editing (like CRISPR)