Cloning is considered the great medical breakthrough of our age. As the definition says clones are copies of another human's look or what he/she likes to eat, but a person's whole personality is based on the experiences in his/her life and there is no method of cloning that can replace the personality. There are also medical disadvantages in human cloning, which make the benefits less effective. It was first thought that stem cells could only be harvested from embryos, but today's researchers are finding that any human cell can be manipulated to replace any tissue of the body.
Health risks from mutation of genes - an abnormal baby would be a nightmare come true. The technique is extremely risky right now. A particular worry is the possibility that the genetic material used from the adult will continue to age so that the genes in a newborn baby clone could be - say - 30 years old or more on the day of birth. Many attempts at animal cloning produced disfigured monsters with severe abnormalities. So that would mean creating cloned embryos, implanting them and destroying (presumably) those that look imperfect as they grow in the womb.
One of the manor Disadvantages of cloning is that there is a continuous debate relating to the ethical issue of cloning. The concept of cloning is hurting a lot of human sentiments ans human believes. There is a lot of controversy regarding whether cloning is ethical or not. at the present time the controversy is storming the world and took a great shape. The whole world seems ti get divided in the issues relating to cloning. The Christianity as well as Judaism do not support the destruction of embryo or the creation of human being artificially.
Cloning has always been a subject whose thoughts both fascinates and frightens the world. On February 27, 1997, a stunning announcement appeared in the British journal Nature that rocked the scientific world: for the first time ever recorded, a mammal- a lamb named Dolly had been successfully cloned from an adult cell. Coinciding with this shocking proclamation, scientist reported the successful cloning of a rhesus monkey, a primate whose reproduction and development is almost identical to man.
Potential Benefits of Cloning
Cloning Animals.-Cloning animals would serve many useful purposes and will be the focus of a major biotechnology industry. The immediate driving force at Roslin was to develop more efficient transgenic animals-animals which have been altered by the addition of genes of other species, such as humans. Current methods, which rely on microinjection of the desired DNA into the nucleus of an egg, are both unreliable and inefficient. If foreign DNA, such as a human gene, could be introduced into cell lines in culture, cells expressing the human genes could then be the source of donor nuclei for cloning. All offspring would then express the desired human gene.
Much current attention is now focused on altering the genes of cows or sheep so that they will produce large amounts of pharmaceutically important proteins in their milk, such as insulin or factor VIII to treat hemophilia. Indeed, it is this application which generated the Wilmut study-the desire to make a transgenic sheep that would include human insulin in its milk, thus providing an efficient source of that substance. There is also interest in producing pigs whose genes have been altered to produce a component of the human immune system's regulatory proteins. This would make pig organs more suitable for human transplantation.
By: peterhutch
