Cloning....Why clone anyway?

[cheerfulgreek]

I posted this in the Medical Thread I started, but I thought it would be a good topic to chit chat about so I thought I would start a whole thread about it.

So what do you think? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? How far can we go with it? Given the problems associated with animal cloning, why would anyone want to do it at all?

Personally, I think it can be a good thing, if people don't over do it. I mean, apart from making human medicines, I think cloning could help boost the numbers of some endangered animal species. I think it would really be amazing to clone extinct animals. Of course doing this would be a much greater challenge than cloning endangered animals, because unfortunately the egg needed to create the cloned embryo has to be from a different species. Kind of like Jurassic Park. They used DNA from frogs to fill in the missing links in order to make dinosaurs.

I think bringing back the extinct animals would be taking things a bit too far, but I do think the good thing about cloning, is we would be able to bring back a lost pet. If it died, we could bring it back and it would more than likely have the same personality as the original. I know this wouldn't be true for all cloned animals though.