Cloning speech
... so on. Anyway, when I had finished reading Jurassic Park, I had a feeling that I had read a book on a similar theme before and as I scanned my bookshelf, the book The Boys From Brazil rang the bell. These two books shared a common theme and do you know what it is? It was about the dangers involved in biotechnology centered cloning, scientifically known as mononuclear reproduction or in everyday terms, baby making without sex. All those terms mean the same. Cloning is to produce carbon copies of a living organism by recombining its DNA in a cell. In a minute, I will go on to explain what DNA is. In Jurassic Park, biotechnology is in such an advance stage that we can make clones of dinosaurs that died a 100 million years ago if we could only get a tiny, tiny spec of their DNA. To make a long story short, dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were cloned by taking blood from an ancient mosquito which was buried alive in resin. Finally, the cloned dinosaurs got out of control and caused havoc on the island in which they were kept. In the case of TBFB, a Nazi scientist secretly got multiple women pregnant with clones of Adolf Hitler using biotechnology towards the end of WW2. The plot was to recreate the Nazi empire using the carbon copy which mostly resembled the real Hitler as the head. The bad guys knew that environment played an equal role with genetics in the development of a human being so they carefully selected families to plant the clones into. The families selected were those which resembled the real Hitler’s family as closely as possible. The conspirators even went as far as to kill the clones’ fathers when they reach a certain age because Hitler’s father was also killed when he was a boy. In the end, the plot was successfully blocked after it was disclosed. But the message of the novel is as clear as that conveyed in Jurassic Park that biotechnology, if misused, will bring about the most harm to mankind. Ladies and Gentlemen, Now what is this… DNA? I would like to spend the next few moments going through the ABC’s of molecular biology. Our body is made up of millions of cells. More precisely, there is approximately 6 times 10 the power of 13 cells in our body. That’s 6 with 13 zeroes following it. In the centre of a cell, there is a nucleus. The nucleus contains a pair of parallel spiraled strings. These strings hold as many as 3 Billion pairs of amino acids. This parallel strings are none other than DNA, it’s full scientific name is deoxyribonucleic acid. And DNA, if uncoiled would stretch a length of 1.8 meters but would weigh less than a fraction of the weight of a single strand of hair. What DNA does is that it acts as a blue print which tells cell how to build us. Any part of our body is synthesized as specified by the amino acids contained in our DNA. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, it may interest you to know that only 10% or so of information contained in DNA is used for synthesizing us. The rest, is as scientist claim, is junk. But don’t you fin...