clone
...to stop and examine what we have accomplished. How far do we want to go with this technology of genetic engineering, better known as cloning? Examining cloning and its many possibilities holds great hope for the future. Centrally the issue of cloning has been a hot topic in the media mainly because it has become a technological as well as a medical breakthrough. Genetic engineering is defined as the alteration of an organisms genetic, or hereditary material to eliminate undesirable characteristics or to produce desirable new ones (Brennen, 57). Cloning is used to increase plant and animal food production, to diagnose disease, improve medical treatment, and to produce vaccines and other useful drugs (Brenner, 58). The first cloning attempt, still being perfected today, was selective breeding of plants and animals, usually for increased food production. In selective breeding, only those plants or animals with good characteristics are chosen for further breeding. Cattle and pigs wer first domesticated about 8000 years ago and through selective breeding have become main sources of meat for humans. Dogs and horses have also been selectivly bred for thousands of years for recreational purposes. The world woke up on February 23, 1997, to the fact that the era of cloning had dawned. At the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, embryologist Ian Wilmut produced a live adult lamb from cells originating in a sheep mammary gland. The method was simple, technologically speaking; Wilmut took a mammary cell from an adult sheep and placed its DNA into the egg of another sheep. He removed the egg’s DNA and fused the adult DNA to the egg. The fused cell began to grow and divide, just like a normal fertilized egg. It be...