I'm not big on cloning at all. Genetics is in its infancy. We've only recently stumbled upon DNA, Watson and Crick in what, the 60s? We've only just sequenced the human genome. So we've got the sequence, all those ATGCs lined up. So...what do they all do and how are they interconnected - no idea. How do all those proteins they code and produce react with one another. No idea. Just little glimpses.
Now we can clone animals.
It seems we live in an age where the progress of science and technology happens so quickly that we don't have time - or we don't care - to pause and ask WHY we are doing something, or IF we should do something. If we try to pause to think, someone else will already be doing it.
From viruses to pinnacle predators, the planet has evolved in a symbiosis on its own. For the first time, we're directly altering that balance at the level of genes - without really knowing the outcome.
For example's sake - viruses and disease can act to keep populations of animals - say sheep - fit. The fitness of the population is driven by the individual's ability to withstand disease and other potentially fatal environmental factors. If a certain individual's genetics allows for greater fitness, those genes stand to be carried forward, thus increasing the species' fitness down the road, perhaps ultimately driving speciation. So then you take an animal and clone it. Effectively stopping the process of natural selection. You may start off with a strong genetic specimen, but if you continue to clone that individual for food, you do not allow for the evolutionary testing process to continue and the door is open for bad things to happen.
Bad things like a certain virus wiping out an entire cloned population, crashing a food source and potentially having economic and health impacts.
I'm rambling on here, so I'll stop, but it's a topic that really concerns me. Along with overpopulation in certain areas of the planet - combined with rapid global travel - we seem to be setting ourselves up for a virus-borne ass-whoopin' of global proportions.
Better to let the farmer graze his flock in the hills and let things run their course than clone Dolly for the 'Hungry Man' factory, IMO.
That said, I don't expect to see large-scale cloning anytime soon.
I guess my answer then is 'NO'.
