Cloning And Ethical Issues Essay Research Paper

Cloning And Ethical Issues Essay, Research Paper

Politics:

cloning history and ethical issues 2000-07-10

Cloning In the movie Jurassic Park, we watched as man was able to recreate the existence of dinosaurs using blood and DNA preserved many years ago. This process of taking cells and using it to recreate a lifeform is called cloning. A few year ago man was blest with the discovery of cloning. But with that discovery came many questions. Cloning has been an ongoing topic of debate among the scientific and political community. The constant question ahs arisen of whether or not we can clone a human being. In recent years much evidence has arisen in the field of cloning. Through the analysis of the positive and negative effects of cloning, and a moral analysis, I will propose that cloning be heavily regulated and limited and that cloning in regards to humans be banned. Listing the history, analyzing the benefits and negative aspects, and showing government reaction, I will come to my conclusion. Cloning can be traced back all the way to 1952 when frogs were cloned from the cells were tadpoles. Although the tadpoles died after a few days, the effort to find the key to cloning continued. In 1970 mice embryos were cloned. Then in 1979 the first sheep embryo was cloned. In 1980 followed the cloning of cattle embryo. In 1993 George Washington University researchers clone human embryos. This sparked a great controversy as headlines across America battered the GW discovery with many numerous ethical violations. Upon the discovery of the human embryos, the New York Times headline read SCIENTIST CLONES HUMAN EMBRYOS, AND CREATES AN ETHICAL CHALLENGE. The first ethical questions were finally raised as the thought of human cloning being possible. Now that human embryos were being cloned, why couldn t human clones start appearing. The technology for invitro-fertilization was already possible. It could have been completed. But the true desire was not embryonic cloning, but of adult cell cloning. An embryo always had the potential to grow into a full form, but no one had yet overcome the problem of taking a fully grown adult cell, and cloning from there. This problem was quickly overcome with the discovery of Dolly. In 1997, embryologist Ian Wilmut and his colleagues did the impossible and cloned a full living sheep from the adult cell of another one. They had overcome the barriers and stepped into a new field of reproductive technology. Their discovery was not really a discovery of new biology, but a discovery of a new technique. They took the cell from the udder of one pregnant sheep. They placed the cell in a petri and starved it of nutrition. This caused the cell to fall into a vulnerable state of hibernation. Wilmut then used the cloning technique of nuclear transfer. They First they removed the nucleus of an unfertilized egg, or oocyte, while leaving the surrounding cytoplasm intact. Then they placed the egg next to the nucleus of a quiescent donor cell and applied gentle pulses of electricity. These pulses prompted the egg to accept the new nucleus and all the DNA it contained, as though it were its own. They also triggered a burst of biochemical activity, jump-starting the process of cell division. A week later, the embryo that had already started growing into Dolly was implanted in the uterus of a surrogate ewe. ( Nash) With the birth of Dolly came more research and questioning about cloning. The process had been established. But there was a question about the reliability of the process. More people started to explore the possibilities of cloning. Wilmut’s breakthrough led to more cloning results. In 1998, Teruhiko Wakayama, a 31-year-old post-doctoral student studying cloning at the University of Hawaii, succeeded in cloning a batch of mice. He squeezed in the cloning work during his free time, carefully manipulating one type of mouse cell after another until, just months after Dolly was unleashed on the world, he succeeded in cloning the cumulus cells that surround the egg in the ovary. Wakayama’s name for his new creation: Cumulina. (Lemonick) His technique was almost identical to Wilmut’s except for two key steps. First, instead of using electric shocks to coax an adult cell into merging with a host egg whose nucleus had been removed, Wakayama injected just the adult nucleus into a nucleus-free host. And second, he let the hybrid cell sit for up to six hours before stimulating it to start dividing. (Lemonick) Where Wilmut got only a single cell to flower into an embryo and then a full-term fetus, Wakayama got dozens; up to 3% of his clones survived. That may be in part because his technique treated the cells more gently. It’s also possible that injecting just the nucleus introduced fewer contaminants into the host cell. (Lemonick) Whatever the reason, the cloned mice were perfectly normal in all respects. They could mate and give birth, and their DNA was so robust that they themselves could be cloned–and their clones cloned. So far, Wakayama and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii have produced three generations of identical mice, 50 in all. Cloning was now on a fast pace but there were many questions that needed to be asked. We knew that we could clone, but what were the positive and negative effects if any. Cloning, like many new scientific fields, has its pro s and its con s. There seem to be so many possibilities when a person thinks about cloning. When one lis