According to Richard Seed, "cloning is inevitable. If I don't do it, someone else will. There is no stopping science" (qtd. in Kadrey 2001). Depending on one's personal opinion on cloning, especially human cloning, such a quote will most likely anger or excite the reader. Human cloning is one of the hottest topics of debate in today's society: the boundaries are very rigid between those who are in favor of continuing cloning research and those who are firmly against it. Meanwhile, despite public opinion, science trudges behind closed doors working to clone the first human being. This article will first provide an in-depth, but brief, introduction to the topic of cloning itself, including its history and mechanisms; then, through a series of carefully considered points, it will illustrate why human cloning should not be allowed to continue at this time. Part A. The "origins" of cloning are vague and vary from source to source. It has been hypothesized that cloning began in 1952, when a group of geneticists removed a nucleus from a frog embryo cell and placed it in an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. To the amazement of scientists, a frog was born from the egg cell with the embryonic nucleus. The research was carried forward in 1975 when British embryologist John Gurdon attempted to do the same thing with an adult cell. Although his research was not fruitful, it sparked subsequent cloning attempts. Research on embryonic cells continued into the 1980s and led to the creation of cloned cows and sheep (Reilly 2000). Finally, in 1997, scientists were able to take an older cell, that of an adult sheep, and successfully create...... middle of paper......." CNN Online. August 29 2000: no. page .Online.http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/08/29/pope.cloning/index.html April 12, 2001.Reed, Susan. my clone" 19 February 2001: 51.Reilly, Philip R. Abraham Lincoln's DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000.Thomas, Cathy Booth "Copydog, Copycat" 19 February 2001: 57."Vatican leads chorus against human cloning." CNN Online 18 April 2000: n. /index.html 12 April 2001.Whitehouse, David, Ph.D. "Cloning of humans: is it really possible?" BBC News 9 March 2001: n. 2001.