Human Cloning a decade after Dolly

The article that I picked to read was entitled “Human Cloning a decade after Dolly.” The main points of this article was to show how the cloning came to be, the reactions that occurred after Dolly was made and the current standings with the whole concept of animal and human cloning.

It was February of 1997 when the news first broke about the successful cloning of the infamous sheep, Dolly. Cloning had been a concept that interested many scientists for years before this first became a reality. As you can imagine, when the news broke that there had actually been a real, successful cloning of an animal overjoyed many people. However, with every good thing, there comes a bad to follow. It seemed that there was an equal amount of people that did not feel comfortable at all with the whole concept of cloning. Some people felt that it was just one hundred percent wrong to try and “Play God.” This controversy soon would have a very large impact on the further practices of animal cloning and the interest to try and clone humans.

The process of cloning Dolly was done by somatic cell nuclear transfer. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is basically making a cloned embryo by means of a donor nucleus. To put it layman’s terms, you first possess a an embryo with a nucleus. You then take that nucleus out of that embryo and discard it. Next, you obtain a second embryo that will in turn have your donor nucleus. From here, you will take out that donor nucleus and then place it in the empty embryo from your first step. After you place that nucleus into the new host embryo, the new nucleus will then be reprogrammed by the host egg cell. After it has been reprogrammed, you are then going to shock that nucleus that will in turn begin the division process. From here you will let it divide over and over again until you have a living organism. To me, in the grand scheme things, it does not seem that complicated at all. I am not saying that I could walk into a lab tomorrow and perform it flawlessly, I am saying that the whole process seems pretty practical on getting success. All you really are doing, is switching things around so to say.

As I mentioned earlier, with every good thing, there will always be a bad to go along with it. In the case of researching and performing both animal and human clones, there were and are many people that do not want this to happen at all. A prime example of this is the fact that it took the United Nations three whole years to try and work up an agreement to make a worldwide ban on human cloning. The UN ended up settling on an “ambiguous non-binding Declaration that calls upon countries to prohibit all forms of human cloning that are “incompatible with human dignity” (Human Cloning a decade after Dolly)

All-in-all, my opinion does not really matter in the grand scheme of things, but I believe that it would probably be in our better interest to just leave human cloning alone and try and move onto bigger and better things.

-Mitchell