Cloning
...gineering them, a breakthrough that became more accessible through the technique of cloning. Most people are not aware that plants have been genetically engineered for years to produce some of our best crops. One of the largest areas that will be helped by animal cloning is animal research. If the animals used in experiments are exactly the same physiologically, the experiments are much easier to control. Fewer animals will be needed for experimentation, with better results. With this successful, cloning organs would be easily accessible. With the ability of organs being cloned, people who may have died before because of bad hearts, livers, or kidneys, would be able to live a normal life with a cloned organ from a pig. One of the most immediate advantages of animal cloning will be in the area of pharmaceutical production. Cheap and plentiful bio-engineered drugs that are made from human proteins will most likely be the first practical application. The ability to clone will allow scientists to genetically engineer animals for a particular protein, and then mass-produce them. The animals carrying the proteins would secrete the proteins in their milk or blood to be harvested and then purified for use. Drugs made from these proteins today are extremely scarce and not affordable. If we were able to make these drugs cheap, not only would we help the pharmaceutical industry, we would also help millions of people with these diseases. One of the last best scenarios would be that with the cloning of plants and animals would come an end to world hunger. With plants and animals being mass-produced relatively for half of what it would cost to breed them, this would cause more food to get out on the market. With more food on the market, cheaper prices would emerge causing less fortunate people to have a chance at purchasing food. Now if were to talk about the idea of a worst-case scenario for the future of cloned food and plants, it would be a very grim subject. Cloning is still an inefficient process, and many questions remain as to whether the cloned animals will be as healthy as normal animals. Most cloned animals do not survive to birth or die soon after. Whether or not this would carry on into the future is yet to be seen, but let’s just say it does. The first problem would be the affect on a human’s health. Let’s say that a person who’s been eating cloned food and plant products over the past ten years suddenly contracts a strange form of cancer. Now at first look one might say its just coincidence that this person contracted cancer. But, what if ten thousand people mysteriously contract the same kind of cancer, all, being cloned food eaters? What would happen then? This is one problem that may arise in the future. The cloned food that people have eaten, secretly carried a bad gene that nobody picked up at the time, but now people are getting sick, causing world wide panic. Secondly, what about the animals that are being cloned, what will happen to them? Cloning is still an inefficient process, and man...