Brief history of cloning and why cloning is important
History of cloning:
Importance of cloning:
Cloning is important for many reasons including advances in medicine, producing livestock faster, improving crops and for the use by police.
Advances in medicine:
Genetic Science Learning Centre. University of Utah, 2010. Web. 23 Sept. 2014. <http%3A%2F%2Flearn.genetics.utah.edu%2Fcontent%2Fcloning%2Fwhyclone%2F>.
My chosen animal:
The below pictures show a brief history timeline of cloned animals, how cloning is important in medicine and my chosen animal dolly:
- The first instance of cloning dated back over one hundred years ago in 1885 with the cloning of a sea urchin by Hans Dreisch. From here Hans Speman conducted the first nuclear transfer experiment in 1902 by splitting a two-celled salamander embryo into separate cells using a single strand of hair from his own child's head. In 1952 Robert Briggs and Thomas King used the nuclear transfer technology found by Speman to clone frogs from adult donor cells. However, it was only in 1963 when the word 'clone' was introduced by J.B.S. Haldane. In 1973 Tong Dizhou created the first inter-species clone by inserting Asian carp DNA into a European crucian carp. Through the many years of researching cloning Ian Wilmut cloned the very first mammal from an adult cell in 1997 with a sheep named Dolly. The cloning of Dolly was a breakthrough in cloning research and started many public debates about cloning of humans.
Importance of cloning:
Cloning is important for many reasons including advances in medicine, producing livestock faster, improving crops and for the use by police.
Advances in medicine:
- In testing of medicines animals models such as mice are used. These mice are genetically engineered to carry disease-causing mutations in their genes, however, this process is time-intensive, requires trial-and-error experiments and several generations of breeding. Cloning would allow scientists to the reduce the time needed to make transgenic animal models, such as the mice, and the result would be a population of genetically identical animals ready to use for a study without the time-intensive process.
- Cloning can been seen as important in making stem cells. Stem cells build, maintain and repair the body throughout an individual's life, as these processes are naturally occurring they can be manipulated to repair damaged or diseased organs and tissues. Cloning stem cells to make identical ones as an individual could be used for medical reasons and for possibly growing whole new organs without the worry of the stem cells being seen as foreign in the body and the immune system being triggered. Cloning stem cells from an individual with a disease lets scientists and researchers understand the disease and develop a treatment for it.
- In medicine cloning is used to find out about many genes that cause diseases, this is also known as gene therapy. Gene therapy is used to find cures for diseases that are caused by genetics. Scientists are using gene therapy to find cures for cancer and AIDS.
- By using cloning a person is able to find out if he or she has inherited a gene on a chromosome from an affected parent by a procedure called genetic screening. This process allows individuals to find out if they have an affected gene or not, if the individual does have an affected gene then they can use strategies to help prevent the disease or make the symptoms/disease itself weaker.
- Instead of cloning livestock for consumption livestock is cloned to make breeding stock. This is a more time effective way to breed livestock, however, only cells from a high-quality carcass can b cloned to give rise to an animal that is able to pass its superior genes to its offspring.
- Cloning can make plants resistant to herbicides, pest damage, infections and diseases improving the quality of the crops we eat. Cloned plants such as wheat, rice, maize, soybean, potato and others have already been produced and ready o be introduced into agriculture.
- Police have also used cloning in investigations for identification, this is called genetic fingerprinting. This process is done by extracting DNA from body fluid such as blood or saliva and cutting the DNA with restriction enzymes.
Genetic Science Learning Centre. University of Utah, 2010. Web. 23 Sept. 2014. <http%3A%2F%2Flearn.genetics.utah.edu%2Fcontent%2Fcloning%2Fwhyclone%2F>.
My chosen animal:
- My chosen animal is Dolly the sheep. Dolly was cloned at the Roslin Institute as part of research into producing medicines in the milk of farm animals. Researchers found that they could transfer genes that produce useful proteins into sheep and cows so that they can produce, for example, the blood clotting agent factor IX to treat heamophilia or alpha-1-antitrypsin to treat cystic fibrosis and other lung conditions. Being able to clone animals such as sheep and cows allows researchers to do this process once and then clone the transgenic animal to build up a breeding stock.
The below pictures show a brief history timeline of cloned animals, how cloning is important in medicine and my chosen animal dolly: