Cloning - The assualt on the sanctity of life

The first 200 words of this essay...

Brian Lockyer Grade 12 Life Sciences Research Task 1/03/08

Do you support the process of harvesting body parts and cloning methods?

The History of cloning

Cloning has been occurring in the natural world for thousands of years. A clone is just a time-delayed twin of another person or animal which results in both organisms acquiring the same set of genes. Throughout history and most notably in the last hundred years huge strives have been made in the field of genetics, and they are bound to keep on happening. The first person known to have successfully cloned an animal was Hans Dreisch in the late 1800's. Dreisch used sea urchins because they have large embryo cells and through his experiments he proved that genetic material is not lost during cell division. In 1902, Hans Spemman successfully separated a 2 celled embryo of a salamander which eventually developed into an identical salamander. Both these early breakthroughs paved the way for the modern concept of cloning.

The next advance happened fifty years later in a laboratory in Philadelphia where a group of scientists successfully cloned a frog embryo. This breakthrough was huge because the team did not simply