Biological Cloning

Cloning

For many years, cloning was a fictitious idea that lay deep within the pages of some sci-fi novels. The idea that cloning could one-day become reality was thought to be a scientific impossibility by many experts, but on one exhilarating day, what was thought to be "purely fiction" became reality. That fine day was February 22, 1997. A team from the Roslin Institute, which was led by Dr. Ian Wilmut changed the face of history forever by revealing what looked like an average sheep, become the first mammal to be cloned. Just like the sheep, through experimenting, and observation many animals, humans, and plants were successfully clone and made history. Cloning has its advantages and disadvantages. The continued success of cloning will continue to cultivate because of several advantages.

Understanding, what cloning is and its procedure will provide a step-by-step guide of what has to be done to complete the task. The definition of cloning is, “the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another” (Webster definition Cloning* p203-204).This meaning that every bit of DNA is the same between the two. There are many ways to perform this procedure one way is obtaining an artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). This transfer allows an exact genetic copy of an organism. Similar to what identical twins go through. The artificial embryo twinning occurs in a Petri dish instead of in the mother’s body. This is accomplished by manually separating a very early embryo into individual cells and allowing each cell to divide and develop on its own. The resulting embryos are placed into a surrogate mother, where they are carried to term and delivered. All the embryos came from the same zygote, they are genetically identical (Tian XC, Kubota C, Enright B, Yang X November 2003). "Cloning animals by somatic cell nuclear transfer—biological factors". Reprod. Biol. Endocrinol. 1 (1): 98. This exact procedure was used on Dolly, the...