Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Cloning

Cloning

There is plenty I don’t understand about cloning but I need to write down what I think I know in order for the thread of it to settle into my pea brain. First allow me to set forth a few fundamentals. There are several variations on the cloning process but this is the one I think I understand best.

In cloning there is no cell reduction leading to a sperm fertilizing an egg. What basically happens is that a nucleus from a cell is stripped out and inserted into an egg that has had its nucleus removed. Once this happens the egg is stimulated, electrically or chemically, to get it to begin dividing. A famous example was in Scotland where a sheep, Dolly, was cloned. Once the cell started doing its division thing it was implanted, in the womb of a ewe (female sheep host) and allowed to develop to maturity.

As a result the offspring is identical to the donor of the implanted DNA nucleus. The female egg and the incubating host added none of their DNA to the process… Well not exactly. You see… in the cytoplasm that surrounds the de-yoked egg there also exists some DNA and RNA. So the biologists used 99.9 percent clone instead of 100 percent clone.

What I didn’t realize was that a cell from a differentiated organ can be used. Even though the cell providing the nucleus might have come from an utter, it still remembers (most?) everything it knew at conception. (I thought they were using the nucleus of a cell from a newly conceived embryo... this is where "stem cell" research is mucking about.)

Now the process is something of a hit and miss proposition. In cloning Dolly, I think the study said there were around 200 failures before achieving a success. Further, that many of the “successes” often have immune issues and something called "Oversized Syndrome." The life expectancy of a clone tends to be significantly less than from a conception accomplished and carried to term the “Old Fashioned Way.’

Presently the Koreans are hard at work trying to clone a monkey. If this can be accomplished science is a short step from having the capability to make it happen in humans. In mice that have been cloned for scientific study it was recently found that over time the genetic code had been compromised. I hope they keep the cage doors locked tight. Think of what might happen if these botched lab animals got into the general population of rodents. Dolly had four (4) calves the old fashioned way. You might want to roll that marble around in that can.

Anyway, we are messing around with things we don’t really understand yet and I suspect it is only a matter of time before something really bad happens.

Like all science, cloning is expensive and it is justified by claims that this research will lead to new cures for diseases and ways to grow organs instead of using current collection and replacement techniques. For example growing an organ from a person’s own cells could avoid rejection issues.

This is the direction that our “industry” is taking us and we need to pay attention to what is happening. We are coming in out of the ”Wild” and if Governments can control cloned and hybrid humans the way the agro industry controls hybrid corn, we are in for some troubling times.