I've arrived in the UK and am staying in Bournemouth for the next week. Although its a bit grey I'm told that a 'heat wave' is on its way!!!!. We had a really long flight getting here with a lot of reading and thinking time, and I thought it would be good to understand what exactly is cloning and why its controversial.
Cloning is the process of making an exact genetic copy of a being. In humans, clones can occur naturally as identical (monozygotic) twins. In 1997, scientists in Edinburgh successfully created a clone of a sheep using a process of somatic cell nuclear transfer implantation, where the nucleus of a mammary gland was placed into an unfertilized egg and implanted into the uterus of the mother to allow the pregnancy to develop. The resulting offspring was called “Dolly”.
I am going to go and visit Dolly when I get to Edinburgh and will blog a bit more about her when I get there. But what was significant about Dolly was that her birth sparked a debate about whether cloning was ethical. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned and made scientists as well as the public believe that cloning a human being could be possible. With this came the inevitable debate about whether it was ethical to clone a human being or parts of it. At the heart of this debate was the concept of scientists being able to “play god” by creating another human being and the human dignity of the clone or the cloned cells being created. The UN, UNESCO and the World Health Organization subsequently recommended bans on all forms of human cloning. Some forms of human cloning remain tightly regulated across the world. In the next few days I’m going to be exploring the different types of cloning (therapeutic and reproductive) to more fully understand the debate about the ethics of cloning.
Some general links about cloning are below:
