Human cloning ban essays

Human cloning ban essays Cloning is best defined as the making of genetically identical copies of a single cell or entire organism (Human Cloning 36). Until recently, scientists believed that animals could only be cloned by the process of combining a cell in the embryonic stage with an egg and fertilizing it to become an embryo, the earliest stage of a living organism. In 1997, scientists from the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced the first successful cloned animal from an adult cell. With recent advancements in technology and this new cloning procedure, the cloning of humans has become a realistic possibility. Human cloning encompasses more than just the creation of an entire human; the ban has halted important research at the cellular level on human embryonic cells and should be revised to allow research to continue in the treatment and possible cures of many illnesses and diseases. Cloning has a longer history than most people realize. The concept of cloning is over sixty years old. In 1932, Hans Spemann, a German scientist, was the first person to propose transferring the nucleus from a cell of an adult animal into an egg to replicate that animal. It was not until 1952 that the first attempt was made to clone a living organism. Robert Briggs and Thomas King attempted to clone frogs by transferring the nucleus of a frog embryo cell, a cell in the early stages of development, into an egg cell. This attempt failed, but the technique became known as nuclear transfer (Cloning 154). One year later, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structural model for Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA). DNA contains the genetic information of each cell and is the chemical basis for heredity. In 1962, an Oxford University zoologist, John Gurdon, was the first person to successfully clone an organism, a frog, using the nuclear transfer process. The first mammal, a sheep, was cloned in 1984 by a Danish embryologist, Steen Willadsen,...