To Go the Star Wars Rout: Cloning
David Rodriguez
College Of Southern Nevada
Professor Phelan

To Go the Star Wars Rout: Cloning

Cloning occurs when you copy a living creature. Two clones have the same genes, small structures with information in them that tells them what the body of a living thing should look like and how it should behave. You get the genes from your parents. Many people think that cloning is only done by scientists in laboratories, but, in fact, cloning also occurs in nature. Animals have billions of cells. The nucleus of such a cell has genetic information called DNA. All the nuclei of an animal have the same information. But each cell only uses a part of this information in order to work properly. The other part of the DNA is not active. But because a single cell holds all the DNA of an animal, scientists can make physical copies of an animal from only one cell. They transfer the nucleus of an animal’s cell into an egg cell of another animal. This egg cell has the same genetic information as that of the donor animal. The cell then grows into an embryo. Scientists must then activate the DNA that was not active in the parent cell. Otherwise a full organism would not develop. Clones do not behave in an identical way – this is because they live in different environments. Researchers have found out that identical twins that carry the same DNA are different because they grow up differently. Cloning animals started way back in the 1950s when the first frogs were reproduced. In 1996 British scientists cloned the first mammal, a sheep called Dolly. Since then the cloning of mice, cattle, cats and other mammals has been successful. Clones occur naturally in many cases, for example, when a mother gives birth to two identical twins. They come from the same fertilized eggs and are therefore have identical genes. Bacteria and animals with only one cell can also reproduce themselves in a natural way. Plants can also produce clones. Farmers use breeding techniques to produce certain types of plants. Cloning is often performed for medical reasons. Experiments are carried out on animals that carry a disease which causes mutations in their genes. Farm animals are cloned to produce drugs and other substances that are useful in medicine. Cloning is a way to produce large numbers of genetically engineered animals. In therapeutic cloning stem cells are reproduced in order to create new organs and tissue. New, healthy tissue can help a person get a new heart or a new liver to replace his ill one. Such a method could also create stem cells that you could use for patients who suffer Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. Cloning gives us a method in which to carry out tests on cells without having to actually do experiments on humans themselves. Although this method isn't perfect, in some cases it works just fine. We can clone cancer cells and test different types of treatments on those cells without putting any real cancer patients at risk, as an example. Also using cellular clones we can do different tests to identify certain processes involved in various cell activities giving us insight into how the cell works. We are so far from figuring everything out and every piece of information we find is another step towards stopping many diseases such as cancer, genetic disorders and the like. There have been proposals to use stem cells to regenerate organs and tissues. The problem with this process is that if I get stem cells from someone else, they’re not mine. Those cells going into my heart, for example, will be rejected by my immune system, just like any transplant organ.

This has led to the proposal of therapeutic cloning. Here’s the case: I have a damaged heart because of a heart attack. My skins are removed and grown for a few days in the laboratory, then sent to a cloning center. In the cloning laboratory, a woman has donated an egg cell. Her egg cell nucleus is removed and replaced by my skin cell nucleus. The egg is then stimulated to divide and forms an early embryo. This is actually possible to do in human medicine today. After ten days, the embryonic stem cells of this embryo, which are genetically mine, are removed, placed in a laboratory dish, and induced to form heart cells. These heart cells are then implanted in my heart, where they repair it. Cloning may reduce genetic variability, Producing many clones runs the risk of creating a population that is entirely the same. This population would be susceptible to the same diseases, and one disease could devastate the entire population. One can easily picture humans being wiped out be a single virus, however, less drastic, but more probable events could occur from a lack of genetic diversity. For example, if a large percentage of an nation's cattle are identical clones, a virus, such as a particular strain of mad cow disease, could effect the entire population. The result could be catastrophic food shortages in that nation. Cloning may cause people to settle for the best existing animals, not allowing for improvement of the species. In this way, cloning could potentially interfere with natural evolution. Cloning is currently an expensive process. Cloning requires large amounts of money and biological expertise. Ian Wilmut and his associates required 277 tries before producing Dolly. A new cloning technique has recently been developed which is far more reliable. However, even this technique has 2-3% success rate.

There is a risk of disease transfer between transgenic animals and the animal from which the transgenes were derived. If an animal producing drugs in its milk becomes infected by a virus, the animal may transmit the virus to a patient using the drug. Any research into human cloning would eventually need to be tested on human. The ability to clone humans may lead to the genetic tailoring of offspring. The heart of the cloning debate is concerned with the genetic manipulation of a human embryo before it begins development. It is conceivable that scientists could alter a baby's genetic code to give the individual a certain color of eyes or genetic resistance to certain diseases. This is viewed as inappropriate tampering with "Mother Nature" by many ethicists. Because clones are derived from an existing adult cell, it has older genes. Will the clone's life expectancy be shorter because of this? Despite this concern, so far, all clones have appeared to be perfectly normal creatures. A "genetic screening test" could be used to eliminate zygotes of a particular gender, without requiring a later abortion. Cloning might be used to create a "perfect human," or one with above normal strength and sub-normal intelligence, a genetic underclass. Also, if cloning is perfected in humans, there would be no genetic need for men. Cloning might have a detrimental effect on familial relationships. A child born from an adult DNA cloning of his father could be considered a delayed identical twin of one of his parents. It is unknown as to how a human might react if he or she knew he or she was an exact duplicate of an older individual.