Eugenics and therapeutic human cloning

Junji Kayukawa pointed out in his book that there are at least three fundamental ethical problems surrounding research on “therapeutic human cloning.”(9) The first of these is that it may support, or sometimes promote, “eugenic ideas” that we all harbour deep down. By this, Kayukawa means our inclination to think that some people (e.g., healthy, talented, smart. etc.) are superior or preferable to others (e.g., disabled, mediocre, rude, etc.). He quoted the words of an American couple who wanted to have a cloned baby. In an interview, the wife said she did not wish to adopt a child whose parent might be a killer, and that her own parents had a strong gene, but if her baby was to be born disabled, she would abort it. Kayukawa detects “eugenic ideas” in her words. He also detects them in the opinion that human cloning should not be allowed because a cloned baby is going to have a severe “disability.” Kayukawa’s conclusion is that “eugenic ideas” shape our attitudes toward human cloning, or even therapeutic human cloning, and hence, these techniques are problematic in terms of ethics. [11/12]

The second problem is that there has not been enough discussion about how we obtain human eggs for therapeutic human cloning. The extraction of eggs puts extreme physical and psychological pressure on the female donor. And while therapeutic human cloning imposes a severe burden on females, the leaders in regenerative medicine appear to be unaware of this kind of gender imbalance. For example, a research questionnaire by a self-help group for infertile women shows that fertility drugs produce various side-effects in more than half of the drug users. In this sense, therapeutic human cloning is considered to be a heavily gender-biased medicine. As Kayukawa and Ogoshi pointed out, this has not been sufficiently discussed.

The third problem is that research on therapeutic human cloning (and research on human embryos in general) is inevitably going to regard a woman’s body as a mere “resource” to be exploited for scientific technology, and a woman’s body is going to be treated as “material” to produce a profit, even if money is paid to her as donor. Kayukawa presents two different opinions: one is from a researcher who said “an ES cell is a mere cell,” and the other is from an infertile woman who said “if we donate our surplus eggs for research, our eggs will become a mere ‘instrument’ for people.” Kayukawa urges us to discuss the gap between these two opinions, or in other words, the gap between these two worldviews concerning human life.

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The Ethics of Human Cloning and the Sprout of Human Life (2004)
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