Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Cloning Can Help Humans and Animals

History was made in 1996 when scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell cloned a sheep. The scientists contend that cloning can produce more suitable laboratory animals, more productive dairy cows, and help reproduce endangered species. Cloning will allow a measure of control over life’s processes.
The cloning of laboratory animals is important for the development of new drugs. Currently, when animals are used in experiments they may have certain genes that give false results. This contributes to much longer testing on animals and can still have flawed results. With the cloning of animals, certain defects and genes can be isolated to obtain what is desired for the experiment.
Cloning may allow farmers to produce much more from livestock than normal. Currently, farmers will try to make their best producing livestock reproduce. Of course, with reproduction, nothing is certain and the offspring may not produce like the parents. This is known to happen to humans too. With cloning, characteristics such as milk production would be as high as those of the original cow.
Endangered species are also another area that can be helped greatly with cloning. When species of animals are endangered, the possibility of maintaining a good gene pool is diminished. If animals of low numbers start breeding with closely related offspring, inbreeding occurs and retardation can be the result. Cloning can allow the taking of good DNA samples, wait a period of years, and then release the cloned offspring to reproduce. This would be kind of like putting two new batteries into your remote control instead of four.
Cloning is of great importance and holds many beneficial elements. New drugs may be developed to fight, or possible cure, the diseases that hinder man today. Farmers may soon be able to have livestock that can help prevent starving in the world. Endangered species may be a term of the past, as we bring back large numbers of endangered animals. Scientifically, more arguments support cloning than those against it. We cannot ignore the wonderful possibilities.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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