Cloning
Megan Vincent
Cloning has been around for a very long time. Although humans have not been cloned,
or at least proven cloned due to the law, the success of cloning has greatly improved since the
early 1950s. From the beginning cloning has started small, but it is having a bigger impact as the
journey continues.
First of all one might ask, “What is cloning?” well it’s the process by which a
genetically-identical copy is made of an organism. In a sense, cloning is just like asexual
reproduction in nature. There are many ways of cloning, like cloning from differentiated cells.
Differentiated cells are cells that have already been turned into part of the body or structure such
as organs, skin, bones, muscles, or in plants, the roots, stem, leaves, etc. Another type of cloning
is nuclear transfer which is a process of these following steps; the nucleus is removed from the
donor egg cell and the nucleus is removed from the cell that is to be cloned and placed into the
donor egg cell. Then a slight surge of energy is zapped into the egg cell to start cleavage in a
Petri-dish until it is to be placed in the surrogate mother’s uterus. On top of different cloning
procedures, there are also different stages the cells can be at like adult cells, embryo cells, etc.
One of the first clones was tadpoles, which were successfully cloned in 1952. After that
in 1958, carrot roots were cloned along with the acclaimed frogs in 1962. The year 1977 brought
the cloning of mice with only one parent and in 1979, three more mice were cloned. As time
progressed, 1984 brought the first cloned sheep by embryos using nuclear transfer was born. In
1986, a cow was cloned from week old embryo cells, proving that the genetic info of a cell didn’t
decrease as a cell specialized. In 1995 the world’s first sheep, Megan and Morag, were cloned
from differentiated embryo cells. The following year brought a great...
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