Dolly the Sheep will go down in History. She has brought up a lot of concern in this world on whether or not cloning is religiously and ethically right. Cloning is something not a lot of people expected would happen before 1996, so it came as a pretty big surprise when the news was released on February 22, 1997, that scientists had cloned the first sheep.

Dolly the Sheep was the first mammal to successfully be cloned from an adult cell. She was cloned at the Rolin Institute in Scotland. She was born on July 5th 1996, and died on February 14 2003. The nucleus in the mammary cell was used to clone Dolly, because the nucleus contains most of the cells genes. This nucleus was put into an unfertilized egg which had its nucleus removed. The cell, was then fused by using electrical pulses. Once the cell divided and developed normally, the scientists planted it into a surrogate mother.

The scientist attempted this process 277 times. From all of the attempts only 29 embryos developed and only 13 were placed into surrogate mothers, but Dolly’s was the only one that was a success. The only thing that scientist could tell was physically different about Dolly than other sheep, was that her chromosomes were a little shorter than normal. Also she only lived to be about 6 when the normal life span is about 11 years. Even though Dolly was a clone, she was able to reproduce just fine.

Before Dolly many mice, frogs, and even cows had been cloned from embryos, but that is different from Dolly because she was cloned from an actual adult cell. Since the cloning took place, many other mammals have been created from adult cells as well, which brings up the concern of us people.

Hearing about cloning, led to a huge reaction from the people about how far scientist would take this and if they would try human clothing. People see this as ethically and even religiously wrong. The religious views are very strong, saying that this isn’t the way life should be made. Most peoples responses were that they didn’t want to see human cloning but they weren’t too worried about cloning animals.

There are still big debates on whether we should continue to clone animals, and if it’s okay to clone humans in the future possibly. Dolly was a huge scientific advance, and will be remembered for a long time.

 

Do you think that cloning is ethically or religiously wrong?

Do you think scientists should eventually try cloning humans?

What is your reaction to all of this?