The Impact of Biotechnology on Animals
a journey through the lives of animals and how they benefit humans...
Cloning refers to those animals whose genetic material is an exact copy. Clones are not only created in laboratories-they occur naturally as well. Modern cloning can be done in a variety of ways including SCNT, molecular, and theraputic. Cloning an entire organism is NOT the same as cloning genes, which is done only to study an individual gene.
What Is It?
Contrary to popular belief, cloning is not a new technology and has been occurring for decades. In fact most fruits are clones as it takes several years to breed a fruit from one seed. Furthermore mammals are a form of naturally occurring clones with an identical form of DNA. Using cells of animal embryos, however, is a relatively new laboratory technique that began in the early 1990s. The technique began to advance in 1997 when Dolly the sheep became the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell rather than an embryo. Since the creation of Dolly, scientists have applied the same technique to clone mice, rats, cows, and goats.
Background
There are several types of cloning. Three of them include
1) Molecular Cloning: involves creating identical, recombinant DNA molecules for uses such as gene expression and mutational analysis. The procedure includes isolation of a nucleic acid that may be a plasmid DNA, genomic DNA, or total RNA. The plasmid is applied as a vector to insert into a bacterial cell. Finally, exponential copies of the DNA are replicated and controlled for gene expression and protein purification
2) Thereaputic Cloning: does not result in the full organism. Although, the process is similar to that of reproductive cloning, the blastocyst is shortly removed after division. Such cells are pluripotent, and are infused inside a patient for replacement of organs or repairing damaged tissues.
3) Reproductive Cloning: results in the production of a full organism. One well known example is that of Dolly the sheep in 1997. The most commonly used technique is the somatic cell nuclear transfer
TYPES
CITATION 2
The first step of the procedure is to obtain the somatic cell from an organism that is to be cloned. Because the somatic cell is neither a sperm nor an egg cell, it contains the complete DNA from the animal it came from. Also necessary for the process is a donor egg cell that is collected from another female of the same species. The nucleus of the cell is then extracted using a pipette and discarded. An electric pulse sent through the two cells causes them to fuse together and activates development in the egg. The activated cell is placed into a culture medium, and cellular division continues until a blastocyst (early-stage embryo) forms. The blastocyst is transferred into a surrogate mother, who then gives birth to a clone that is identical to the genetic donor.
Before Dolly was cloned, many scientist
that the process of differentiation cannot be reversed.Dolly's succesfull creation revealed that it was possible to make an already differenciated behave as a recently fertilized one. Dolly's birth was extremely essential as it provided an alternative method to cloning, rather than relying on the use of human embryos.
Somatic Cell Transfer
Many people oppose cloning as they believe it to be an “unnatural” way of reproducing. If perfected, cloning could completely transform the way we control nature in Western societies. Opponents fear that this manipulation can result in severely damaged animals that continue to have health problems all their lives. A survey conducted by Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology reported that the 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning while just 22 percent were comfortable with it. The intensive debate eventually led the FDA to conduct an evaluation that consisted of examining the safety of food and the risk to animal health. A report released in January 2008 revealed that the offspring of any animal clones are as safe as the food we eat every day. Moreover, further studies showed that clones aged normally and were no more vulnerable to diseases than non-clone organisms.Neverthless, it will take years before animal clones are consumed or become a regular incident in our science field. Because the success rate ranges from 0.1 percent to 3 percent, the procedure, at the moment, is both inefficent and expensive. There several reason for this failure:
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the egg and the tranffered nucleus may not function well together
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imaplantation of the egg into the surrogate, may fail
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the surrogate may not carry the organism to term despite imaplantation
Ethics
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