Should cloning be regulated? By who and How?

There is obviously no single correct answer to this question. The most important thing you need to clarify when asking this question is what TYPE of cloning you have in mind.

The kind of cloning you see in crappy sci-fi films and on uninformed news stations is usually called "reproductive cloning," which means you take the dna of a donor organism, and inject it into a host oocyte (female reproductive cells), resulting (if everything goes as hoped) eventually in a fully grown organism that is genetically identical to the donor organism. This obviously encounters many ethical issues. PERSONALLY, I can't imagine any possible scenario in which reproductive cloning of humans is ethically acceptable.

Another common type of cloning is "therapeutic cloning," in which you create natural human tissue, but artificially alter it to contain the same DNA as the organism into which the tissue will be implanted. This is useful for people who need an organ transplant, skin graft, or some other operation that requires putting some sort of tissue into them that they either don't have or was damaged somehow. If you just take tissue from anyone, your body's immune system recognizes it as foreign and attacks it (a major problem in organ transplants). But, if you create tissue that is genetically identical to the tissues in your body, this rejection doesn't happen. The main ethical issue is the source of the tissue - one of the most convenient ways to go about it uses embryonic stem cells, which destroys a fetus in the process. To put my opinion on this matter into extremely condensed form, I think therapeutic cloning should use other types of stem cells that can avoid the issue of embryonic stem cells, which would hopefully eliminate most ethical objections to this type of therapy.

No matter what type of cloning we are talking about, I believe that NIH should form a cloning ethics board to carefully determine exactly which protocols should be used while dealing with cloning in the future.