I just want to point out that the transporters on Star Trek weren't the clone-o-tron types, that was something that another scientist thought up. The transporters on star Trek worked in a more straight forward fashion in that they would deconstruct the person, convert their matter to energy, transmit it to a destination and reintegrate the person on the other side. Examples for this being:
In "The Savage Curtain," Captain Kirk describes to 'Abraham Lincoln' the transporter as being an "energy/matter scrambler" where the molecules in the body are converted to energy, beamed into the transporter room and converted back into their original pattern.
In the ENT episode "Strange New World" we saw a crewman getting transported up during a horrific storm and coming out on the other side with rocks embedded in his skin.
In Deep Space Nine we got to see transporters used to send people to the mirror universe.
In the Voyager episode "In the Flesh" Chakotay related a story about his uniform getting stuck in the pattern buffer and he rematerialized with only his combadge.
In several episodes it's stated that if a person remains in the pattern buffer for too long their signal will start to degrade and they will die if not rematerialized quickly enough; "Relics" and "Our Man Bashir" to name two.
But the most prominent example of the transporter keeping the original person original would have to come from the TNG episode "Realm of Fear" where Lt. Barclay thought he was suffering from transporter psychosis. In that episode, we actually got to see what it looks like inside the matter stream as the person is being transported.
So, yeah, the concept of a clone-o-tron is interesting, but that isn't what's going on with Star Trek.
Stop looking at me like that. You don't have to be a nerd or Trekkie to know this stuff.
...though it does help.