Cloning

The Extended Essay

Research Question:

Saving a life by killing another, is cloning worth it?

Introduction:

Peter is eight years old. The doctors found out that he has hemophilia, a disease in which blood is unable to clot, due to a lack of the clotting factor VIII. This means that if Peter has a wound, his body will not be able to form a crust and heal. Instead, the wound will keep on bleeding until doctors surgically close it. Although this is just an imaginary example, hemophilia is not uncommon. Scientists have therefore done much research to find cures for this disease. Doctors know that bone marrow is essential in the treatment of patients with hemophilia because it contains the clotting factor. Yet acquiring that bone marrow is not always easy. In the first place, the amount of bone marrow available is very limited. Not many people are willing to take the risk of transplanting some of their bone marrow, since they have to undergo a heavy surgical procedure and there is always a possibility that it could end fatally. Secondly, the bone marrow of the donor has to match the patient’s bone marrow exactly. If this is not the case, the bone marrow will be rejected by the recipient’s body and might cause an even worse condition. How easy it would be if doctors would be able to produce bone marrow that matches the patient precisely, by merely taking a few cells and manipulating them. And that is exactly what their idea is: to clone the patient and use the clone’s bone marrow. Although this sounds like the perfect solution to the problem, not only has creating a human clone been merely an unachieved idea, it has also been an idea that the whole world is looking at, and so has both supporters and opponents. This makes it still harder for doctors to decide whether they should even begin this new investigation. The fact that not everyone agrees with the creation of a new, identical organism out of only one cell makes this topic as interesting as it is. If everyone would agree with cloning, it would merely be another step in technology. Also, cloning is an important and valuable topic to study because lives depend upon this part of science. If scientists accomplish the production of healthy human clones, more and more people will be able to survive diseases. On the other hand, a great amount of people believes that cloning a human being simply to kill it and use its body would, ethically, not be the right thing to do. The numerous controversial arguments on this topic make for a hard assessment as to whether cloning is worth both the physical and the mental manipulations considering both the positive and negative consequences of cloning. (

Background

Over the past several years, the process of cloning is one of the most discussed topics in biomedical research and biotechnology. Cloning started to become more and more popular when in the 1950’s scientists showed their ability to clone frog tadpoles by using a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this method the scientists make use of the nucleus of one adult cell, which they transfer to another cell, from which they have also removed the nucleus. So in the case of the frog tadpoles, researchers remove the nucleus of an embryonic frog cell and put it into a different cell. In that way, the scientists had created a cell with a different nucleus. To the scientists’ incredulity, most of the cells kept dividing, just as regular developing embryos would divide, creating many cells which would all take on a different function. Finally, the cells grew into tadpoles. The tadpoles all came from the same adult cells; therefore, they all consisted of the same genetic material. Although this was a very successful and enlightening accomplishment, a few problems did occur. In the first place, the tadpoles remained tadpoles until they died. For some unknown reason, the tadpoles did not grow into real frogs. Secondly, nuclear transfer worked on tadpoles and tadpoles only. No other mammal’s cells would develop as far as the frog’s cells. Although researchers at present have found out a way to make the cells of sheep act the same as the frogs’ cells, at the time, the reason for this problem was unidentified. While these problems prevented the scientists from cloning other organisms, at the same time it motivated them to find another way to create carbon copies out of no more than a couple of adult cells. Therefore it was a great achievement when, about thirty years later, research implied that there was a different technique that could be used to create clones of mammals. In that new technique, called artificial twinning, scientists used the principle of identical twins. They artificially split the embryos to create a genetically identical replica, imitating the way in which identical twins would be created in nature. The only differences are that artificial twinning occurs in a plastic petri dish as opposed to the mother’s womb and that a surrogate mother, instead of the biological mother, will deliver the cloned organism. (http://www.lib.msu.edu/skendall/cloning/).

Now that more knowledge became available, researchers tried to clone all kinds of organisms. Although many of those trials were unsuccessful, scientists kept devoting many hours looking through their microscopes, in the attempt to become the first human being to succeed at cloning an organism of some kind. It is therefore not hard to imagine how thrilled everyone was when, after many years of hard work, on the 22nd of February of 1997, Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced that they had finally managed to clone the first mammal from an adult cell. As is well known, this mammal was a sheep, named Dolly. While Dolly came to life the 5th of July in 1996, Wilmut and his team decided to wait with the announcement that they had successfully cloned a sheep until February of the next year. For the creation of Dolly, the researchers used the method called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which also had been used for the cloning of the tadpoles in the 1950’s. Although this method had then only worked on tadpoles, Wilmut was able to use it on sheep very effectively. Hence, the first step in Dolly’s creation was the isolation of a somatic cell, coming from a fully developed female sheep. Then, an egg cell was isolated and again the nucleus was taken out. After that, the nucleus from the somatic cell was relocated into the egg cell. At this point, the scientists had an egg cell with a different nucleus. The new cell behaved just like all other fertilized zygotes and became an embryo. Finally, the scientists placed the embryo