Am I A Clone?
Posted by Ashley on November 19, 2009
Before reading my blog post, may I recommend that you watch the preview of a movie I have provided below. It is interesting, I promise.
Did you enjoy that? I did. I watched the movie The Island recently and it got me thinking about a lot of interesting things…
Maybe we are not real.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/News/This_Just_In/TJI_SHOCKED-face.jpg&imgrefurl=http://thephoenix.com/Providence/News/63885-Naked-in-the-public-square/%3Frel%3Dinf&usg=__EgmQgg2N36j_Lg00tAK_kz3cxlE=&h=365&w=475&sz=21&hl=en&start=5&sig2=dIFgsXtK0jnst6TAJqUfdg&um=1&tbnid=oWtHqG-JWpHS2M:&tbnh=99&tbnw=129&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dshocked%2Bface%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=9xkFS7nDLMKTkAX7wLHLCw
Maybe I am a clone.
http://www.pcimagenetwork.com/express/p3.jpg
In the movie, all the people think they were saved from a terrible contamination out in the world and were put in a facility, waiting to be transported to “the island”. In reality, they are clones of real people out in the actual world who bought them as a form of insurance on their lives. The clones are all programmed to think that going to the island is the only thing they live for in their lives. They are also inputed with the memories of their “host” to make them think that they are real people. To them, that is their life because they don’t know anything else.
http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/movie/theisland/the_island_1.jpg
I actually scared myself so badly I got nightmares.
When I calmed down, I started thinking about cloning. I have always been fascinated by this particular topic. How exactly do you make an identical replica of someone? Aren’t we all supposed to be unique? So I did some research.
http://mashittah.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/individuality2.jpg
The first ever living thing to be cloned was a sheep. The clone was named Dolly. What happened is, a somatic cell was taken from the adult sheep and the nucleus of that cell was transferred to an egg cell with the nucleus removed. The egg cell which contained the nucleus from the adult sheep eventually became like a freshly fertilized zygote. The egg cell was then put into another sheep chosen to be the surrogate mother and given birth to. Dolly was born exactly identical to the adult sheep the nucleus was taken from. This process is called SCNT which stands for Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer. Even though the fertilization of an egg and SCNT both result in an embryo, which is a division of cells, the two sets of chromosomes in each embryo are acquired differently. In the fertilization of an egg, the two sets of chromosomes come from the egg cell and the sperm cell, while in SCNT, the two sets of chromosomes come from one nucleus belonging to one living thing. Because of this, the resulting offspring is identical to its “mother” because there are no sperm cells to create variations.
http://repairstemcell.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/clone_dolly.jpg
After Dolly was successfully cloned, many other animals have been cloned too. There are talk amongst South Korean researchers who are planning on using the cloning technology to help advance the health of humans. The possibility of generating stem cells is there and not out of reach. Many are saying that it is possible to clone children who died as a newborn so as to avoid the devastation of a mother. The success of cloning technology has opened up many realms of possibilities in the world of science. People can now live longer and the cure for cancer may just be a hop, skip and a human clone away.
However, this leads to the whole argument of whether or not cloning humans is ethical or is it taking away the right for humans to be individual. Or, in the case of The Island, whether or not we are taking away the human rights of the clones because in all technicalities, they are also human. But I shall not get into that since this is supposed to be a scientific blog and I don’t want a bad grade.
Bibliography
“What Is Cloning?” Learn. Genetics. The University of Utah. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. <http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/tech/cloning/whatiscloning/>.
June 1st, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Very interesting choice of post topic Ashley. I’ve always wondered about cloning and its effects.
One thing you wrote about that really made me think hard was the cloning of still-born babies. Considering that it takes around 10 months for an embryo to grow from a cell to a baby, a still-born child would still be devastating to the mother, and her pain might even get worse if the cloning of her baby fails, after waiting so long for him/her. On the other hand, even if the cloned baby survives and is successfully “made”, the death of her first baby would still affect her quite harshly.
However, putting this scenario aside, I can imagine how cloning would improve humanity, with advancements in stem cell research and curing diseases; We could actually do scientific tests on human subjects, observing how a certain chemical affects the human body. This, in my opinion, would be the most useful thing that cloning could achieve. However, this usage of clones would require a radical change in the ethical thinking of humans (non-cloned ones), because even now, conducting hazardous scientific research on even a close family of humans, primates, is banned, because they are so similar in physical and biological construct as us. Imagine what would happen if we used actual human beings for these kinds of tests.
Many of the new realms of biological testing on humans can be explored through the use of clones, but considering the rules and laws that already govern scientific testing on primates, cloning might not be such a useful thing after all.