Cloning and Government Funding

In some of my previous posts I discussed whether or not cloning was advantageous or ethical. Although this is a very important part of analyzing cloning, there’s one major aspect of it that I am yet to touch on. This aspect is how much it costs to implement cloning. Even if cloning was solely advantageous and had no drawbacks how much would it cost to fund?

As college students entering the work world you must decide for yourself whether or not cloning is a promising field of experimentation and is a worthy area to disperse taxpayers money. Not only are the results currently somewhat inefficient, but cloning costs an unbelievable amount of money. It has been The most recent data from the Biotechnology Industry Organization shows that the industry as a whole spent over $180 billion on research and development between 1994 and 2006, spending nearly $23 billion in 2006 alone. During this time period only animal cloning was mainly experimented with due to a 1995 Congress ruling to prohibit federal funding of research that involved the destruction of embryos.  President Bush affirmed this decision, but more recently President Obama lifted many of these restrictions. In more recent years, from 2010 to 2013, our government has spent over $450 million on ONLY embryonic cloning alone. In addition to government funding, there are various philanthropic sources that contribute a small fraction to cloning research. This is an astronomical amount, considering the small benefits that are a product of this research. It seems very apparent to me that the government should consider other, more promising areas of research to fund with these great sums of money. The amount of money put into the funding of cloning as a whole is only increasing, so answers to whether or not cloning it worth the money must be uncovered.