To clone or not to clone:
replicating living things isn’t all that bad, is it?
Cloning hit the spotlight when Finn Dorset lamb 6LLS, otherwise known as Dolly the sheep, became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. To produce Dolly, scientists used an udder cell from a six-year-old Finn Dorset white sheep. They found a way to ‘reprogram’ the udder cells—to keep them alive but stop their growth—by altering the growth medium. Then they injected the cell into an unfertilized egg cell which had its nucleus removed, and made the cells fuze by using electrical pulses. The unfertilized egg cell came from a Scottish Blackface ewe. They fused the nucleus from the adult white sheep cell with the egg cell from the black-faced sheep. They …show more content…
Most clones tend to have problems during later development, such as having something known as Large Offspring Syndrome (LOS). Clones with this disease tend to be much bigger at birth than their natural counterparts, and can grow to be much larger than normal. This includes them having larger organs, which can lead to various breathing and blood flow problems. The clones are also at risk for not expressing the right genes at the right time. In a natural, unaltered embryo, DNA is programmed to express a certain set of genes at certain times, in certain ways. Later on, as the embryonic cells begin to differentiate, the program changes. These programs are different for each type of cell. When cloning, the transferred nucleus does not have the same program as a natural embryo. In this case, scientists are the ones responsible for reprogramming the nucleus--any slight error in the programming can cause the embryo to develop abnormally, or even fail entirely. Lastly, another defect occurs in the telomeres of the cells. As cells divide, their chromosomes get shorter. Telomeres, which are the DNA sequences at both ends of a chromosome, shrink in length each time DNA is copied. The older the animal, the shorter the telomeres. Clones cells have longer telomeres than their normal counterparts. Clones cells show other signs of youth and appear to have an extended lifespan when compared to …show more content…
Take Charles Darwin’s Galapagos Island finches, for example. The birds used to be all the same: color, beak shape, wing size, etc. However, the same species at one point dispersed onto the different Galapagos Islands, eventually becoming their own individual species. Although people can change the number of animals in an population or ecosystem, the “survival of the fittest” concept is still in play, and that’s something we can’t effectively change so easily. If we were to release the clones from the carefully maintained environments where they are kept, to be studied and observed, would they be able to survive, evolve, and adapt? Could they even mate and produce healthy offspring? Could those offspring produce offspring in turn? As of now, we can’t answer any of these, seeing as the release of clones into the natural world has not yet been attempted. Thus, these questions remain entirely
replicating living things isn’t all that bad, is it?
Cloning hit the spotlight when Finn Dorset lamb 6LLS, otherwise known as Dolly the sheep, became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. To produce Dolly, scientists used an udder cell from a six-year-old Finn Dorset white sheep. They found a way to ‘reprogram’ the udder cells—to keep them alive but stop their growth—by altering the growth medium. Then they injected the cell into an unfertilized egg cell which had its nucleus removed, and made the cells fuze by using electrical pulses. The unfertilized egg cell came from a Scottish Blackface ewe. They fused the nucleus from the adult white sheep cell with the egg cell from the black-faced sheep. They …show more content…
Most clones tend to have problems during later development, such as having something known as Large Offspring Syndrome (LOS). Clones with this disease tend to be much bigger at birth than their natural counterparts, and can grow to be much larger than normal. This includes them having larger organs, which can lead to various breathing and blood flow problems. The clones are also at risk for not expressing the right genes at the right time. In a natural, unaltered embryo, DNA is programmed to express a certain set of genes at certain times, in certain ways. Later on, as the embryonic cells begin to differentiate, the program changes. These programs are different for each type of cell. When cloning, the transferred nucleus does not have the same program as a natural embryo. In this case, scientists are the ones responsible for reprogramming the nucleus--any slight error in the programming can cause the embryo to develop abnormally, or even fail entirely. Lastly, another defect occurs in the telomeres of the cells. As cells divide, their chromosomes get shorter. Telomeres, which are the DNA sequences at both ends of a chromosome, shrink in length each time DNA is copied. The older the animal, the shorter the telomeres. Clones cells have longer telomeres than their normal counterparts. Clones cells show other signs of youth and appear to have an extended lifespan when compared to …show more content…
Take Charles Darwin’s Galapagos Island finches, for example. The birds used to be all the same: color, beak shape, wing size, etc. However, the same species at one point dispersed onto the different Galapagos Islands, eventually becoming their own individual species. Although people can change the number of animals in an population or ecosystem, the “survival of the fittest” concept is still in play, and that’s something we can’t effectively change so easily. If we were to release the clones from the carefully maintained environments where they are kept, to be studied and observed, would they be able to survive, evolve, and adapt? Could they even mate and produce healthy offspring? Could those offspring produce offspring in turn? As of now, we can’t answer any of these, seeing as the release of clones into the natural world has not yet been attempted. Thus, these questions remain entirely