Science has come a long way. Scientists are always learning and doing new things that were impossible yesterday.
One of the amazing things that happened was in 1997 when some British scientist cloned a sheep named "Dolly". Dolly was reproduced by reproductive cloning. She lived to be the age of 6 although she only lived half the life span she was expected to live after doing a biopsy they found that other than arthritis and cancer Dolly was normal. That in itself was an amazing discovery.
Hundreds of animals have been cloned. Yet they are still unable to clone monkeys, dogs, chickens and horses. Scientist feel that this is because some species are more resistant to somatic cell nuclear transfer. During this process they strip the nucleus from an egg shell and they replace it with a cell from a donor one. This is a very traumatic process and a lot of the eggs don't make it.
Scientists are even trying to reproduce organs. I think that this is an amazing a great thing. While we have numerous organ donors out there, there just isn't enough to go around and a lot of patients die while waiting to receive an organ.
There are alot of risks associated with cloning. More than 90% of attempted clones fail. It takes more than 100 attempts to produce one live offspring. Cloned animals also tend to have health issues and die at a young age.
This makes me wonder if cloning is something that we should be doing. Are scientists trying to play God by creating life? I defintely agree with cloning organs but, I am not sure how I feel about cloning animals and eventually humans.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
1) I liked that your essay was very strait forward and to the point. It was writen where anyone could read it even if they didn't know anything about cloning.It was very informitive. Nice essay.
2) You could have used some pictures. Also you could have talked about other issues with genetic engineering besides just cloning.
3)I didn't realize that they were unable to clone monkeys and dogs as of yet.
4)It is also suprising that dolly died at a young age. She had cancer, so could the cloning have caused her to get cancer?
Your essay is very simple and to the point. It was very educational without getting into too much content. The only thing I think that you could have improved on were to elaborate on your opinion of the topic a little more and to maybe have another viewpoint on the subject. The one thing that made me stop and think was the fact that scientists cannot clone horses, monkeys or dogs yet, that seems a little strange to me. The most surprising thing to me was the fact that they cannot clone those animals. Maybe it is because there are multiple types of those particular species or some other unknown variable. Overall I thought it was a good essay.
Nice essay. You displayed a common knowledge of the subject and relayed it in a manner that was easy to follow and understand. maybe next time you could use some pictures and graphics to display some images relating to the subject. Nice Job
Post a Comment