FREE ESSAY ON CLONE IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

CLONE IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

A Clone in Sheep's Clothing
Three years ago a sheep named Dolly became the biggest news since the first successful
open-heart surgery. Dolly, unlike every other mammal on earth is an identical copy of its
mother. Dolly has no father. The miracle of cloning was preformed by Dr. Ian Willmut and
his team at Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. The new research has opened a large
amount of possibilities for the future use of the technique as well as many ethical
issues regarding human cloning.
The Roslin Institute team created Dolly by transferring the nuclei of adult sheep cells
in to the egg of another female sheep. The egg had its natural nucleus removed by
microsurgery. Ones the new nucleus was implanted in to the egg cell it now had a complete
set of genes identical to the sheep who donated the nucleus. The transplanted egg cells
were then cultured for a short period of time and implanted into a female sheep to carry
the pregnancy to term. The nuclei of many different adult cells were used in the
experiment including mammary gland cells, which were the ones to produce the successful
result. The sheep born as a result of the experiment was an exact genetic duplicate,
clone, of the sheep donating the adult nucleus. Though other mammals have been cloned
before, they were always created form embryonic cells, never a cell of a fully-grown
animal. This research also proved that adult animal cells do contain a workable copy of
all the genetic material needed to create a whole new animal.
Willmut's technique is very difficult and requires a lot of work. Because of this, it is
not practical way of creating animals. The company who funded the research plans on using
cloning in order to create animals that will produce important drugs in their milk, but
at this moment it is not the best way to do it. On the other hand, the difficult method
will probably be improved and simplified in the future becoming an important tool in
biomedical research.
Unfortunately, this new discovery opens the door to the ethics of human cloning. Most
scientists agree that human cloning is wrong and should be banned. It is now illegal in
many nations including England but remains technically legal in the United States. The US
government refuses to fund any human cloning research and has asked that all private
companies do the same. There are many ethical issues involved in the debate about human
cloning including the fear that people will create clones in order to use them as organ
transplants. The line between cloning for research purposes and for selfish reasons is
very thin and many ethics committees have been created to discuss and determine the
limits to which this technique should be allowed to go.
Though the Wilmut technique is very complicated and requires a lot of work, the equipment
needed can be found in any advanced biological research lab and it will be very difficult
to prevent doctors from offering cloning as an option to patients who need help, such as
the parents of a dying child. Other labs have now confided their progress toward
recreating Wilmut's results and cloning may, one day, become as commonplace as in vitro
fertilization.