Much hasn’t been said about cloning lately in the news since the first animal was cloned. Dolly the sheep made a revelation in science that genetics could be possible to enhance it. It’s not known how cloning will affect us or even the clones themselves, or if it will result benefit to us or unnecessary risks that shouldn’t be taken. I believe cloning is an immoral and risky choice to continue researching on or even testing on living beings. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from adult cells, rather than an embryo. In the beginning of 1996 other sheep were being cloned using adult cells as have other animals. So when scientists at Roslin Institute in Scotland produced Dolly only lamb born from 277 attempts, it was major scientific achievement. It was a complex and difficult task, to produce Dolly the scientists had to use the nucleus of an udder cell from a six-year old Finn Dorset white sheep. They had to fix the udder cells to keeping them alive but to stop them from growing in which they achieved by altering the growth medium. Then they injected the cell into an unfertilized egg cell from a Scottish Blackface ewe which had a nucleus removed, and made the cells fuse by using electrical pulses. Once the research team fused the nucleus from the adult white sheep cell with the egg cell from black-faced sheep, they needed to make sure the resulting cell would develop into an embryo. The team from the Roslin Institute had to do 227 cell fusions, 29 early embryos developed and were implanted into 13 surrogate mothers. But only one pregnancy worked and the ending result was a 6.6kg Finn Dorset lamb 6 pounds born after 148 days. What scientists hope will come out of this is that cloning technology will bring new ways to produce medicines and improving understanding of development and genetics. It also brings into question whether human beings should or should not be cloned. What we know today is that cloning animals, such as Dolly, had some risks. One risk is a high failure rate, that only 0.1 to 3 percent of cloning attempts are successful. This means that for every 1000 tries, only one to 30 clones are created. Also, this technology isn’t cheap-- it costs money and to get your own personal clone in the future might cost even more. Another risk is that Dolly was much bigger than the average Finn Dorset white sheep, so now scientists know that the clone is much bigger than the natural counterpart. This is called Large Offspring Syndrome. Abnormally large organs could lead to problems breathing, blood flow, and other things. Also, abnormal gene expression pattern is another risk, which means the clone won’t express the right genes at the right time. Another risk is telomeric differences which is what would happen if the transferred nucleus is already old, this will shorten the lifespan. These risks show us what might happen when cloning animals—now, what if we clone humans? Is cloning a solution to ending diseases and getting to live a bit longer? In June 1998, President Clinton publicly condemned human cloning; he said that “any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry… Each human life is unique, born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science.” The New York Times published an article in 1997 which discussed if cloning should be allowed. The article mentioned a survey, “ABC News asked people whether cloning of humans should be allowed. Ten percent said yes, 87 percent said no. O.K., but would it be 'morally wrong?' Eighty-two percent replied that human cloning would be morally wrong; 14 percent said it would be fine with them.” It proves the point that we’re missing around with something more complex than simple copying of genes. We are dealing with clones that might change the future in our stand point. Will these clones have the same rights as we do or who will have this technology? Today, we’re facing an economic crisis that many are being unemployed and in the future what will come for each of us if we clone more people. It’s just too risky to take the chance to have such technology.
