Cloning is safer - the perils of sexual DNA combination?

[Brian37]

If we cloned Hitler from his DNA, it would not be Hitler, it would just be a contributor of DNA. If you put Hitler's DNA on a ancestry website, he would still be connected to relatives outside his mother and father who don't share his last name. I am not saying you are claiming this, just that there are idiots who would claim it. 

Why would you bring this up?  No one asserted that cloning would result in recreating exact duplicates of historical people.

As far as birth defects, just like abortions, medical decisions should only be regulated for safety, but not forced or banned procedures either way by government. Point is, cloning humans, like stem cell research, has the potential solve lots of medical issues, sure, but those on the paranoid far right, not you, but those on the conspiracy right constantly get scared by new technology. I can remember back in the late 70s early 80s the term "test tube baby", and how the far right said that was playing God, now fertility clinics nobody bats an eye at. 

I doubt cloning humans could solve so many medical issues.  Cloning body parts could.  If you clone a human, you have a new human and you can't ethically harvest their parts.

BTW, there are still religious wingnuts who don't like in vitro fertilization.  I used to work with a guy who considered it to be sacrilegious.

Again, it still amounts to care of avoiding unintended consequences. Henry Ford made travel easier for sure. But that still does not change that the world needs to drastically reduce burning greenhouse gasses, and the sooner the better. 

There was a comedian in the 80s, forgot his name, whom went off on the PETA crowd about animal experimentation, and made the joke, something like "If using a car battery and jumper cables, to shock a monkey's brain will cure AIDS, I say, "Red is positive and black is negative". I am not saying I agree with the humor, just that I remember the line. 

I am not being fatalistic in saying the following, just being pragmatic. I think it isn't a stretch to say that humans are becoming a victim of our own success. The bigger the world's population becomes, the more resources we require, and the faster we compete over those resources, the planet cannot keep up with our pace of consumption and absorb our pollution. 

I don't say that to sound fatalistic. It is basically saying your house is painted blue, when it is painted blue.

[Paleophyte]

There are several reasons that cloning is a bad idea:

1) We can't. The technology does not currently exist to reliably clone a human being.

2) Copy error accumulation. Your distant descendants end up and copy of a copy of a copy... The accumulation of genetic errors eventually reduce said descendants to something slightly less sparky than a turnip.

3) Four billion years of evolution has shown time and again that self-replication is a trap that any organism that possibly can does its damnedest to avoid. Even bacteria swap genes.

4) There are some truly horrific ethical consequences too numerous to list here. I'll give you the easiest one: Which government or corporate agency do you trust to clone you?