SALT LAKE CITY — Will affluent people start cloning replicas for easy organ donations? Will large corporations begin cloning low cost labor forces?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is a little more complicated. Depending on who you talk to, cloning of humans is now more an ethical than technical dilemma.

The history

Attempts at cloning started as early as 1885 when Hans Adolf Edward Dreisch successfully cloned sea urchins. Cloning equipment has been as unusual as a baby's hair, which was used in 1902 and 1928.

"Hans Spemann fashioned a tiny noose from a strand of baby hair and tightened it between two cells of a salamander embryo until they separated," a description on the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center website reads.

In 1975, the first mammalian embryo was cloned using nuclear transfer by J. Derek Bromhall. He successfully cloned a rabbit embryo and watched it develop. Bromhall chose not to allow it to mature as it would need a female rabbit for a surrogate. However, in 1984, Steen Willadsen followed through with installing a cloned sheep embryo in a surrogate ewe and it produced three lambs.

Where we are now

So far today's headlines featuring human cloning have done more to pique curiosity than raise fears, but is this changing?

In an article written by AFP that was published by Yahoo! News, chief executive Xu Xiaochun of the Boyalife Group said he wants to start cloning "genetically identical super-cattle that he promises will taste like Kobe and allow butchers to 'slaughter less and produce more' to meet the demands of China's booming middle class."

Boyalife and its South Korean partner, Sooam, along with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are already working to "improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research," according to the article. Xu Xiaochun is 44 and attended university in Canada and the U.S. He has worked with Pfizer and on drug development.

Sooam is experienced in the field and already sells clones of pet dogs. So far it has created clones for over 600 rich pet owners who missed their canine companions too much. The company is also currently working on a project to bring back the woolly mammoth. Additionally, Sooam used the cloning of eight coyote puppies with a dog as surrogate to prove cloning could be an interspecies process.

The ethical dilemma

In his interview, Xiaochun points out it is "a short biological step from monkeys to humans — potentially raising a host of moral and ethical controversies." According to him, Boyalife isn't working on human cloning only because "it has to be 'self-restrained' because of possible adverse reaction."

The brevity of that biological step is the question. Fraudulent claims have been made before. Hwang Woo-suk, a geneticist, "claimed in Science magazine in 2004 and 2005 that he and a team of researchers had for the first time cloned a human embryo and that they had derived eleven stem cell lines from it," according to Arizona State University's Embryo Project Encyclopedia. It was later proven that he'd falsified the data. Woo-suk is the same geneticist who helped Sooam with its pet dog project.

Jeffrey Kahn, the Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, has been speaking and answering questions about human cloning for over 15 years. In a John Hopkins Gazette article, he said: "We're effectively as far up the ladder of using animal models as one can go. Oregon Health & Science University has cloned nonhuman primates. That leaves only humans."

He believes someone will eventually try to clone humans when they have "come up with a reason that they feel is compelling enough to justify it." He points out most people aren't aware human cloning isn't against Federal law and there are only a few states that outlaw it. The Food and Drug Administration has no jurisdiction over medical techniques.

Human cloning is a very complicated issue, but it seems that scientists are currently bound more by ethical than technical issues. How do you get medical consent for a clone when the clone doesn't even exist yet? What are the rights of clones? Are they the property of the genetic donor? These are some of the highly controversial questions coming in the not-so-distant future.

Kent Larson is from Phoenix, Arizona. He's been happily married for 30+ years. They have two sets of twins and he's been teaching for 26 years. His interests are his family, writing, reading, music, and movies. Find him at kentalarson.wordpress.com.