Rough Draft Cloning Essay

Debora Atwater

Mrs. Yost

English 7

February 20, 2004

Rough Draft Cloning Essay

In 1997, scientists in Scotland created Dolly, clone sheep. Many groups of people responded to this by asking if this would lead to human cloning. People have many views and questions on the prospect of cloning humans and other mammals.

Some people ask who, in fact, is Dolly. Dolly was the cloned from an adult dorsett ewe in 1997 by Scot Ian Wilmut and his team. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult mammal-something that was thought to be impossible. Out of 277 nuclei, only 30 turned into embryos one only one developed into the birth of Dolly. Wilmut was the first scientist to make adult cells act like embryonic cells. Before Dolly, scientist didn't think gene transplant could be preformed on any other cells than embryonic cells. The process used for Dolly could work theoretically on humans (Winters 17 ЃE18).

There was a verity of reactions to Dolly and the prospect of human cloning from three main groups. These groups consisted of the general public, the media, and political groups and individuals. In the general public, the main response Dolly got was it got people thinking that the cloning of Dolly would lead to human cloning. Several groups took polls on what people thought of the cloning of humans. One of these polls was by an organization who made a telephone poll of 500 adults on October 28th, 1997 with a 4% mess up rate. One of these was if they thought cloning was morally wrong and the responses included that 58% said yes and 31% said no. Although, when the poll asked if the person would have wanted to be a clone; the response was that 6% said yes and 86% said no. Another question was if the person would want to clone a child that they had conceived, the response was that 7% said yes and 90% said no (Elmer-Dewitt 65-69).

Another public group went to people on the street to ask them what they thought about human cloning. The interviewed public generally 'stuck up their noses and turned down their thumbsЃEand say phrases such as; 'you shouldn't fool with Mother NatureЃEand 'don't play GodЃEwhen asked about cloning. Some people said that we need to guard our distinctiveness. Other people did not ask 'whetherЃEbut 'whenЃEthe cloning could start and 'what thenЃE Some said that how we come into being is not trivial; it makes us who we are (Elmer-Dewitt 65). Some said that people treat human cloning differently from other scientific breakthroughs. People didn't question heart-transplants as much as people questioned cloning. Dr. Harold E. Varmus, director of the NIA, asks to close the research of cloning, saying, "Cloning of an existing human being is repugnant to the American peopleЃE(Varmus in Winters 17).

The media made a very big impact on how people view cloning. A Time magazine (Nov 97) shows a picture of a stamp stamping identical babies over and over again. The title is "Cloning: Where Do We Draw the Line?ЃE(Elmer-Dewitt 64). Displays like these make the public think of cloning as some mass production industry and usually show little effort to inform the public that clones will not, be the same (Dudley 29-30). Some sci-fi shows show that they making clones to crate some 'headless-mutantsЃEfor spare parts. When the news about Dolly were heard, the rates of people asking for movies like Multiplicity and The Boys from Brazil went up dramatically. The media has really influenced people's thoughts about cloning (Herbert 59-61).

Many people, all around were wondering how their president was going to react to the prospect of cloning in the USA, just as anyone else. Also, since the nation has reacted so dramatically, President Bill Clinton said that he was going to give temporary moratorium-or suspension on federal funding on cloning research. Then, Clinton made the NBAC to further investigate the issue before he made a final decision. Next, NBAC said in June of 1997 that they were going to continue their previously announced research. This program was made to create a human child using the techniques of cloning (Dudley 7).

Even after hearing all of this talk about a clone sheep, some people still don't know exactly what cloning is and how scientists go about making clones. The main definition of cloning is when two people have the same genetic material - or genetic code. There are three main kinds of cloning which include; natural cloning and two types of nuclear transplantation. There are also natural clones called, identical twins (or triplets, quadruplets, ect.), and they are made by a normal fertilization. During this process, the egg and the sperm meet normally; each of the parents giving exactly half of the genetic material. Although, the egg, after being fertilized, splits into two eggs and creates it's own cellular membrane to become two separate eggs all together, both with the same genetic material. This is the natural and totally random way to clone (Winters 6).

The first nuclear transplantation works in a completely different manor. This way, the egg is fertilized by more than one sperm in a petri dish. Then the egg with the two or more sperm divides into two cells as the first stage, just like in a normal birth. Then, an artificial coating-or zygote is added to each of the two egg cells to make two separate egg cells, just like in natural cloning. After that, the cells start to divide by twos to make an embryo inside their zygote. In the laboratory, the cells would now stop the process, because the scientists purposely chose abnormal eggs that have 0% chance of survival. This is how people do nuclear transplantation (Elmer-Dewitt 69).

The other nuclear transplantation is when they actually change the genetic information. First, they take an egg from a mammal's womb and empty the genetic information from it - or they take out the nucleus (this is where virtually all of the genetic information is stored) using enzymes. Then, they put the nucleus of one of the cells of the mammal that they want to clone inside of the egg in place of the nucleus that was taken out. Then, they put the modified egg inside the womb of another sheep (called the surrogate mother) that has no genetic connection to the clone and the sheep becomes pregnant.