The Controversy Of Cloning And Cloning - 1156 Words

For what purpose animals such as frog, mouse or sheep need to be clone? To what extend these organisms are able to use for cloning? Some people may wonder whether cloned organisms exist or not after watching live action movies, animes or cartoons that consist of cloned characters. The answer for this question is yes, clones do exist. The term, cloning is a process of producing genetic identical living organism asexually using genetic material such as DNA. A cloned organism is likely to have the identical gene with the parents. There are several types of cloning such as therapeutic, reproductive and embryonic cloning. These steps are performed by expert scientist with the aid of modern technology. The first experiment on cloning was carried†¦show more content†¦Genetics Discussion: PCR as the cloning technology There are a variety of methods to produce a clone. One common laboratory technique in the present is somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) which will be focus in the essay. In this process, the nucleus, which contains the genetic material is removed from the female donor egg cell (ovum) and discarded, leaving the enucleated egg cell. Next, the nucleus of somatic cell from another donor is removed but kept; the enucleated somatic cell is discarded. Then, the nucleus of the somatic cell is fused with the enucleated egg cell by applying electric current. The egg cell containing the somatic cell nucleus will begin to divide. After the single cell forms a blastocyst, it is implanted into a surrogate mother uterus for further development. The sheep named Dolly was successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell using the above laboratory technique. She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (Edwards, 1999). The experiment started with 277 fused eggs but only 29 fused eggs became fertilized. The fertilized eggs were transferred into 13 sheep, however only one sheep became pregnant successfully. The other remaining 12 sheep failed to pregnant and several dead fetuses were then discovered from them. The successful clone, Dolly was born on July 5, 1996. Unfortunately, Dolly only live up to the age of six which is