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Cloning Technology

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1997, another milestone here. Because the British scientist Wilmuth from Roslin Institute cloned the Sheep or cloned the animal Dolly the Sheep. Now if I have a black-faced sheep and then I have a white-faced sheep. If I mixed both of them, most likely, I’m gonna get a sheep with speckle or speckled face. If I want just the white-faced sheep, what can I do? What can I do is… I take the donor egg from the black face I removed the nucleus, well, remove the genetic material. And I take the cell, for example, the bone marrow cell from the white face. and I fused the two together.
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And I cultivate the cell in the embryo and then eventually I implant the embryo into fetus of the black face and because the generic material comes exclusively from the white face. And therefore the offspring or the little lamb would have white face. So this is animal cloning succeeded by the British scientist in 1997. And of course, you all know that the cloned animal actually lived for about 50% of the normal life expectancy which is about six, seven years. But normal life expectancy is about 15 years. So, there are work to be done to be perfected but in principle and in practice that can be done.

Dolly the sheep garnered much attention because she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her successful birth proved that specialized cells could be used to create an exact copy of the animal. Tremendous ethical debates were stirred by the announcement of the successful cloning.

Steps involved in gene cloning: First, transplant of a nucleus from a mammary gland cell of a Finn Dorsett sheep into the enucleated egg of a Scottish blackface ewe. Second, the nucleus-egg combination was stimulated with electricity to fuse the two and to stimulate cell division. Lastly, the fused egg was developed into an embryo in vitro, and implanted into the womb of the black-faced sheep. As a result, the impregnated black-faced sheep delivered a white-faced clone.

Here is an reference for you to think about the cloning experiment: 20 Years after Dolly the Sheep Led the Way—Where Is Cloning Now? According to the author, “cloning has had a bigger impact on science, but a smaller one on human life, than many expected.” Do you agree on the arguments of this article?

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