Essay about Cloning: Dna and Artificial Embryo Twinning

Submitted By swoon28
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The prospect of cloning humans is highly controversial and raises a number of ethical, legal and social challenges that need to be considered. There is both practical and moral opposition to cloning, but, for the most part arguments are theoretical since there has not been a lot of experience in cloning. Cloning is one step beyond cross breeding, designer breeding, and genetic modification, all of which have their benefits and their problems. I think that cloning is good because it can help with many medical advances and food production.
Cloning is the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another. It is the process of producing similar populations of genetically identical individuals that occur in nature when organisms such as bacteria, insects or plants reproduce asexually. Cloning is used to create an exact copy of a mammal by using the complete genetic material of a regular body cell.
There are two ways to clone something, artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer. Artificial embryo twinning is the relatively low-tech version of cloning. As the name suggests, this technology mimics the natural process of creating identical twins. Somatic cell nuclear transfer uses a different approach than artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result.
Much of what researchers learn about human disease comes from studying animal models such as mice. Often, animal models are genetically engineered to carry disease-causing mutations in their genes. Creating these transgenic animals is a time-intensive process that requires trial-and-error and several generations of breeding. Cloning technologies might reduce the time needed to make a transgenic animal model, and the result would be a population of genetically identical animals for study.
It is used in a wide range of biological experiments practical applications, such as genetic fingerprinting.
It allows us to develop organs people can use to replace their own failing ones. If we could clone someone’s heart for example, we wouldn’t need to have donors as we could just replace his heart with a clone that was in better condition. One of the benefits of cloning is reproducing animals. For example, animals that are endangered can be saved by cloning. Another reason for reproducing animals is for food. You could clone pigs, cows, and chickens, and end up with more food to help starving people.
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