urrently possible because the somatic cells are specialized and there are many genes that have been "turned off" that we do not know how to "turn back on". Remember, not much has been done in the field of cloning, so a lot of this is still theoretical.
             There are many arguments against the cloning of human beings, and it seems that if you ask ten people, you will get several different opinions. On the scientific side there are several issues that need to be addressed. First, that the failure rate of the cloning process is very high. When Dolly was cloned, the scientists started with 133 eggs that formed 30 embryos. Of these thirty, only one was successfully impregnated into a female sheep (Wertz, Geneletter). Some may point out that the in-vitro fertilization also has an extremely low success rate, but cloning is much lower, at about a ten to one rate (Wertz). Second, this is definitely not a proven method yet for human cloning, and it relies on a small amount of speculation in the process. Third, if we tried to clone someone today, that baby would definitely have at least a small amount of birth defects. The reason is that using an adult cell to clone from is really a bad starting point. The adult cells have shorter chromosomes because as cells divide, they become shorter. So as we get older, the chromosomes "run out of room" to divide again, and this is called cellular aging (Wertz). Since the new cloned person would have these same genes, they would basically begin their life at that person's age. If the donor was ten years old, then the cells in the cloned human would have chromosomes that begin at age ten, not zero.
             The other side of the coin are the ethical issues that cloning brings up. Some people believe that if we clone someone we will be "playing god" in our hospitals. Medicine has been doing just that for years now. We save premature babies and perform in-vitro fertilizations every day, an...