By Emilija Šaltytė
Introduction
In this summary I will present the
issues related to human cloning, to be more precise, the process of cloning,
the scientist achievements in this field and reasons why cloning of humans have
been banned in many countries.
Key Terms:
Cloning - the process of
producing a clone.
Therapeutic cloning - the permitted creation of cloned human tissues
for surgical transplant.
Reproductive cloning - the cloning of organisms of an adult female
and this creating a new organism.
DNA (desoxyribonucleic acid) - a long linear polymer found in the nucleus of a
cell and formed from nucleotides and shaped like a double helix; associated
with the transmission of genetic information.
Somatic cell - one of the
cells that take part in the formation of the body, becoming differentiated into
the various tissues, organs.
Embryos - the young of a
viviparous animal, especially of a mammal, in the early stages of development
within the womb, in humans up to the end of the second month.
Summary:
Probably,
everybody has heard something about Human Cloning and therefore the theme of
“Cloning of Humans and other primates” is very popular.
First
of all, all the stuff of mammals cloning started with Dolly the sheep. Dolly
was „born“ on 5th of July, 1996. Dolly was cloned by some scientists at the
“Roslin” Institute, a part of the University of
Edinburgh, Scotland, and the biotechnology company, based near
Edinburgh. The astoundingly complex concept of cloning boils down to a fairly
simple (in theory, at least) practice: you need two cells from the same animal
– one of which is an egg cell from which you’ve removed the DNA. You take the
DNA from the other somatic cell and put it inside the devoid of – DNA egg
cell. Whatever that egg cell goes on
to produce for an offspring will be genetically identical to the parent cell.
However, today we can’t just simply
clone a human in our house or garage
because of scientific, ethical and commercial reasons. The legalities on
human cloning differ around the world. For example, in the USA , human cloning
is only explicitly outlawed in eight states. According to the Bioethics Defense
Fund, an additional four states simply prohibit state funding of human cloning
and 10 states allow human embryos to be cloned but ban the embryos from being
allowed to mature. And in Lithuania the human cloning is also banned
(legislation).
For these legal as well as ethical
reasons, it’s probable that the future of cloning will lie more in therapeutic
cloning research than reproductive cloning. The only difference between
therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning is that in current goals for
therapeutic cloning are meant to develop both patient and disease specific
therapies for certain conditions. The procedure could also potentially use a
patient’s own cells for tissue replacement. Although the science is exciting,
it will likely take many decades of research before scientists are able to
create transplantable tissue.
But
why is the world banning the human cloning? As it was mentioned before, it’s
due to scientific, ethical and commercial reasons and because the technique,
called somatic cell nuclear transfer, turned out to be not so easy in other species. “I think no one
realized how hard cloning would be in some species thought relatively easy in
others.”, said legal scholar and bioethicist Hank Greely of Stanford University.
“Cats: easy, dogs: hard, mice: easy, rats: hard. Humans and other primates:
very hard.”
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