How Can a New Organism Be Created by Cloning?

Almost everyone around the world has heard of Dolly, the famous cloned sheep. Still, for those who haven 't, Dolly was a sheep "created" in a laboratory, by manipulating cells, in an experiment Scottish scientists conducted in 1997. Unlike sheep conceived through sexual reproduction, from two parents, Dolly had genes identical to those of her mother. So how can a new organism be created by cloning? How does cloning work?

Cloning means creating a genetic duplicate of the organism, creating another organism that has the exact same DNA. Dolly became famous all around the world, and made it to all news, but actually cloning was around long before the first cloned sheep appeared. Just think of the gardeners who like to make copies of a certain plant by rooting a stem cutting. In nature, single-cell organisms reproduce by cloning when the cell splits into two new cells with identical genes. Moreover, identical twins start out as a single fertilized cell, which splits into two, forming two genetically embryos - clones of one another.

However, even though the articles about cloned animals generally refer to them as identical copies, actually they 're not exactly the same. The DNA that controls inherited characteristics is located in the nucleus, but there 's also a second DNA source - the mitochondria. The mitochondria consists of small structures in the cell, involved in energy production, and are always inherited from the mother, because they 're part of egg cells, not sperm cells. So mitochondrial DNA represents only a small part of the DNA in a cell. If you create a clone by nuclear transfer, it will actually not be as closely related to its nuclear parent as identical twins are related to one another.

In creating Dolly, the scientists removed the nucleus from the egg of a sheep, keeping the rest of the cell intact. After removing this nucleus, they took another adult sheep, isolated a single cell and removed its nucleus. By transferring the nucleus to the egg cell, they created a new complete cell, with genetic information identical to that of the adult sheep. This cell divided and formed and embryo, which was implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother. Therefore, Dolly developed as a clone of her parent, the sheep from which the nucleus was taken.

Ever since this experiment was successful, a lot of controversy stirred around it, because if such procedures worked for cloning a sheep, they should also work for cloning humans. However, the implications are far greater when it comes to human cloning, and several other aspects must be taken into consideration. Just the idea of human cloning has generated numerous scientific, ethical, religious and various other dilemmas and polemics.

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