scince case study: cloning

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 Should cloning be allowed?

       

                                      By Theo Grace

Contents

Page-

  1. Title page- should cloning be allowed?

  1. Contents page

3-4. Introduction

5. How it works

6. Evaluating human cloning/cloning endangered species?

7. Plant cloning

8. Animal cloning

9. Who and why to clone?

10. Just because we can, does it mean we should?

11. The human clone (if it was achieved)

12. Conclusion/Evaluation

13. Bibliography

       

Introduction

 In this investigation I am going to explore the different aspects of scientific cloning, how it came to be, and why it may be necessary in the modern age. There are several theory’s as to why cloning may be important now, and in the years to come. First of all there is a food shortage in our world. This is due to the high demand on food as the worlds population increases (population expected to rise from 6.5bn to 9bn in the next 10 years) this indicates that food is going to be a vital aspect in preventing world hunger. In the present day almost 1 billion people go with a minimal amount of food everyday and approximately 400,000 die everyday due to starvation. There are other factors such as over-fishing and extinction of species that have to be taken into account, but overall the human race is to blame. Simple cloning procedures such as the cloning of crops and fish may slow down the crisis that we are facing. Other uses of cloning are organ-cloning used for medical transplants and cosmetic cloning which may be for a commercial use.

The term cloning means to create an exact replica of something else and derived from the Greek term κλών which means twig or branch.

It was first brought out by the media in 1997 when ‘Dolly’ the sheep was cloned. The sheep it self was an exact replica of a sheep which had died 7 years before. However dolly was the one success out of 276 tries.

In this case study I will look at the ethical and technological aspects of human cloning and whether it should be allowed.

In the table below I will display the various animals that have been cloned over the last century. The Animals are shown in alphabetical order.

From this information, we can see that a wide variety of animals have been cloned, though the success rate has been very low (seventy calves have been cloned from 9000 attempts and one third die young) and with costs of up to $28,000,000 for certain species.

There have also been side affects such as accelerated aging, excessive growth, early death and disease. This evidence is still at and early stage.

I have formulated this graph to give an indication into the number of animals cloned in recent years. We can clearly see a strong positive correlation which tells us that the number of animals rises with the number of years. We can assume this is because of advance in technology, research and understanding of cloning.

I will now talk about how cloning works scientifically and the implications of this. I can also focus on the ethical issues that arise and explain why not every looks at cloning as acceptable

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How it works

To clone an animal in a lab a scientist must extract the nucleus from a donor cell. There also has to be an enucleated cell from another donor. The scientist will then fuse the cell and enucleated egg with electricity. The egg fused with a cell will then turn into an embryo. The embryo will then be implanted into the donor of the nucleus which will then go on to give birth to an exact replica of the donor of the egg cell. This usually takes hundreds of attempts.

     

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