Our advanced intelligence has allowed us to improve our race by using the resources on this planet as we see fit. Modern science can improve upon the natural order of the world and this extends to cloning and fetal tissue research. Opposition to those advances is based on poor logic and faulty reasoning.

The cloning success of Tetra the monkey is a dramatic leap beyond the tadpole experiments of the 1970s. Considering that monkeys are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, cloning humans is not far off.

Objections to human cloning based on the overpopulation argument are ludicrous. Economic factors make cloning very expensive and outside the reach of most. It raises the hackles of those who despise cloning on ethical grounds. They claim scientists are playing God and that creating life in a lab is unnatural.

The religious objection, that we are playing God, has been made before with birth control, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization. With the possible exception of birth control, no one would dare object to these scientific advances now.

The charge fails to distinguish between commonplace advances like penicillin and debated issues like cloning. Who is to say which scientific advancement is permissible?

The claim that cloning is unnatural is wrong. Death is a natural part of life yet we seek to cheat it at every opportunity. If death is natural and we try to defeat it, why should that not extend to life?

No one would dare try to stop in vitro fertilization. Yet people who need it to breed are determined by nature not to reproduce. If genetics tells us we are unfit to reproduce, we say “To hell with nature” and try, try again. Cloning is no different.

If we were made in the image of a creator and we possess the abilities to manipulate our environment and ourselves, shouldn’t we?

The one claim that has been raised and yet I think every rational person disagrees with, is that clones would not be people like the rest of us.

Since we have already determined that a person is more than the sum of their genetic material, their origin of conception makes no difference.

We have no idea what a soul is or where it exists, yet everyone believes in it. To say a clone would have no soul would be as ludicrous as saying a child born by in vitro fertilization has none.

Clones would be just as real as anybody and making them is not unnatural or morally wrong.

Fetal tissue research is another touchy area plagued by vehement opposition.

In 1998, researchers at the University of Wisconsin successfully used embryonic tissue to grow human stem cells (CNN, Nov. 5, 1998). Stem cells are blank cells capable of developing into any type of cell in the human body.

Once they differentiate in the later stages of conception, they adopt a specific function and grow into a specific part such as liver cells or brain cells.

By isolating the stem cells before they differentiate, scientists could theoretically use them to grow new cells in damaged organs.

While that advancement could someday be good news to heart attack victims, there are vocal opponents to the stem cell research. Their objections are based on where stem cells come from: Fetuses aborted early in pregnancy.

One could make the claim that using an aborted fetus in research is the same as somebody filling out an organ donor card. They’re both dead now, so what does it matter? You might as well make their death mean something instead of sticking them in the ground and piling dirt on top of a box.

However, scientists are working to assuage your feelings of guilt concerning aborted fetuses.

While some research was done using tissue from aborted fetuses, the scientists at Wisconsin took sperm from a man and used it to fertilize an egg taken from a woman.

The fertilized egg grew in a petri dish for a few days until it became a blastocyst, at which point certain cells were removed and cultured into stem cells.

The difference here was that no fetus was aborted. Rather, the clump of cells was grown in a lab and then cultured to produce the needed product.

There was no development of organs, indeed no evidence whatsoever that what was grown in the lab could be considered a human being.

Yet there are still opponents of fetal tissue research who rely on faulty reasoning. They argue that blastocysts are human life because given nine months it would eventually mature to become a person.

Using that reasoning one could consider a lone sperm a human being because it has the potential to fertilize an egg. Considering the millions of sperm within the male body, masturbation amounts to genocide!

Perhaps we should start arresting men who masturbate for crimes against humanity?

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Aaron Woell is a senior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill. He considers science its own god.