Could Effectively Treat Infertility Jane And Adam example essay topic

Cloning for a Cure: How "Embryo Splitting" Could Effectively Treat Infertility Jane and Adam, a recently married couple in their mid-thirties, are living the American dream. Both Jane and Adam have high paying professional careers and live in an upscale suburb of Pleasantville, USA. But, both Jane and Adam feel that something is missing, that somehow their life together is not complete. Jane and Adam realize that they have all this happiness and no one to share it with. After much consideration, Jane and Adam decide it is time to start a family. After many unsuccessful attempts at getting pregnant, Jane goes to her doctor and discovers that her body is unable to produce a sufficient number of viable eggs on its own.

In a situation like this, fertility drugs and in vetro fertilization can only solve part of the problem. By current standards, Jane and Adam's dream cannot be realized because, like one in every 12 couples in this nation, they suffer from an incurable form of infertility ("Infertility in America" 1). "Infertility [the inability of a couple to bear a child after one year of attempted conception] is a condition that affects more than 5 million couples nation wide", says Dr. Mary Martin Pierce, director of the in vetro Fertilization Center at San Diego Medical Center ("Infertility in America" 1). In the past two decades, several treatments have produced in an attempt to cure infertility, and as of yet, none are of them are 100% effective. And, in extreme cases like Jane's, there are no conventional solutions. However, in the past ten years, modern medicine has begun to explore the potential benefits of cloning embryo cells (Brock 5).

Embryonic cell cloning, when used in combination with other modern procedures, can be an effective treatment for infertility. Embryonic cloning, or simply "embryo splitting", has been used on mammals since the early 1980's, has already been used to produce several, genetically diverse offspring (Singer 136). In recent years, philosophers and doctors alike have reasonably concluded that this treatment could be used to treat human infertility. Amongst the leading contributors in this field are Dr. Ronald Green, the Director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College, and Peter Singer, a noted Philosopher and Director of the Center for Human Bioethics at Monash University, Australia.

With the aid of today's medical technology, the process of embryo cloning is quite simple. First, an embryo cluster of two to eight cells is selected. Next, through a process called "cell-mass division" the large group is broken down into individual cells (Harris 199). Finally, these individual egg cells can be fertilized and either frozen or directly implanted into the uterus through in vetro fertilization. While it is true embryonic cloning alone cannot cure infertility, when it is used in conjunction with other high-tech methods (e.g. vetro fertilization, cryogenically freezing fertilized egg cells) the procedure could be highly effective (Brock 5). According to Robert Gilmore McKinnell, a biologist specializing in cloning research", [combining methods] has a multiplier effect... if procedure x has a success rate of 25% alone, when it is combined with procedure y, which has a success of 10%, the overall effect will be much greater than the individual sums" (79).

In the case of Jane, embryo splitting would drastically increase the number of viable embryo cells for implantation; thus, it could multiply the success rate of in vetro fertilization, which has an average success of only 25%, increase her overall chance of becoming pregnant ("Infertility in America" 4). Although embryo splitting is highly effective in theory, the application of such a practice would not be practical at this point in time. Because of the monetary costs related to developing technologies that could directly copy human cells, the process is not yet economically feasible. Additionally, because there would be limited numbers of medical and scientific professionals who could actually perform the procedure, embryonic cell cloning would not be convenient (Green 3). Furthermore, there are numerous ethical and moral concerns about cloning that must be addressed, if not resolved, before any experimentation can be conducted on humans. While the future of embryonic cloning for the purpose of assisted reproduction remains uncertain, the hopes of couples like Jane and Adam live on.

And maybe, someday in the near future, the medical and scientific communities will not only find a way to make embryo splitting a more affordable, but also a more readily available option for infertile couples.

Bibliography

Brock, Kelly. "In baby quest, science becomes a common tool". Business Journal 21 Mar. 1997: 23 - 26.
Gail Group. Health and Wellness Resource Center. Siena Heights Univ. Lib., Adrian, MI. 6 Sept. 2002 web Green, Ronald M.
Should We Be Working Toward Human Cloning for Infertility Treatment?" Contemporary OB / GYN May 2000: 51.
Gail Group. Siena Heights Univ. Lib., Adrian, MI. 6 Sept. 2002 web Harris, John".
Good Bye Dolly?' : The Ethics of Human Cloning". Ethics in Practice: An Anthology. Ed. Hugh Lafollette. Malden, Mass. : Blackwell, 2002.
199-208. "Infertility in America". Today Show. Infertility Series, episodes 1-5. Narr. Katie Couric, et al. NBC. W NWO, Toledo. 1-5 March 1995.
McKinnell, Robert Gilmore. Cloning: A Biologist Reports. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Singer, Peter and Deane Wells. Making Babies: The New Science and Ethics of Conception. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985.