Should We Condone Cloning?

Welcome to technology day, where you follow me into different corners of technological advancements throughout history, speculations for the future, or crazy sci-fi madness. I'll try not to talk about artificial intelligence for awhile since I've already written maybe three different articles on the subject. If you want to read those click here.

Today, I want to talk about cloning. Remember all those years ago in 1996 when scientists in Scotland successfully cloned the first sheep, Dolly? I don't because I was being born at the time, but I remember reading about this happening in school and being blown away. We actually cloned something like in sci-fi shows and comics. I couldn't believe it. What could this possibly mean for the human race? Was Dolly the first step in humanity's long awaited journey into immortality? I hope not - mostly because I already wrote an article on how humans achieve immortality on here. You can read that here.

I have a lot of questions for cloning and what it means for our species. I hope you do too, because there's no turning back now. I'm also going to break down the history of cloning into years to make things a little easier to understand. And it goes much further back then I realized.

1902 - The First Step

Hans Spemann, a German embryologist, came up with the idea that if you were to split a two-cell salamander embryo then it might be possible for two identical salamanders to develop individually. Hans fashioned a loop from a strand of baby hair and separated the embryo into two - and it worked.

This then led him to what he called ‘The Fantastic Experiment’ - the idea that an embryo could be grown from an egg without insemination. More accurately, he believed that if we were to replace the nucleus of an egg cell with another kind of cell, we could create an exact copy of the ‘parent’. Not quite Jurassic Park - but close.

1952 - The Fantastic Experiement

Hans’s Fantastic Experiment was proven successful when English biologist Robert Briggs and American researcher Thomas King transferred the cell nucleus from a tadpole embryo into a frog’s egg cell. But it took us until 1975 for this same experiment to be attempted with a mammal. They called the process an embryonic nuclear transfer, which British science-whizz J Derek Bromhall first tried with a rabbit. This experiment didn’t go any further than the initial test, but it paved the way for further research.

1984 - Cloning Mammals

This was the year of Dutch scientist Steen Willadsen’s great breakthrough - he created history’s first-ever mammal clone. Once the embryonic nuclear transfer was complete and the fused cells began dividing, he popped the cells into the womb of a surrogate sheep and hey presto - three lamb clones were born.

1990 - A New Law

Once mammal cloning had been achieved, naturally thoughts began to turn to the impact this could have on humans. But there was huge, public, moral opposition to the idea of human cloning, so the UK parliament created the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. It required researchers to be properly licensed by the newly-appointed Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. It also stated that no embryo used in research could be transferred to a woman, and an embryo is only allowed to be developed for 14 days after.

1996 - Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

This is when cloning moved into the fast lane. Megan and Morag were born - two lambs cloned without the use of embryonic cells. British science duo Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell switched the nuclei of cultured cells with the nuclei of egg cells. This new method gave rise to the new method of using somatic cells (non-embryonic cells). In this case, they used the nuclei of udder cells to create 277 embryos. Only one survived: Dolly - our shining totem to humanity’s power over nature.

1988-1999 - Cloning Hits Its Stride

Experiments abounded across the world and a wide variety of animals - including mice, goats and cows - were cloned. They even managed to clone a male mouse - all other clone animals had been female up to this point. Then in 1997 a team at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center successfully cloned two Rhesus monkeys, called Neti and Ditto. This seemed to bring the idea of cloning humans even closer.

2001 - Battling Extinction

Scientists understood that cloning could offer the world something different - give endangered species a fighting chance to beat extinction. Many animals don’t take well to breeding in captivity, but it was thought that cloning could help endangered species to overcome their unwillingness to procreate. Whilst cloning is still not seen to be a good means of conservation, the success rate is around 5% - so perhaps one day it might still have a role to play in saving some species from extinction.

2008 - Human Cloning Begins

The first successful human embryos created using somatic cell nuclear transfer were announced in 2008 by Andrew French (an Australian scientist) and Samuel Wood (an American fertility specialist). Five years later, the first human embryonic stem cells were created. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his team in x used somatic cell nuclear transfer of a patient's skin cells to a donated egg cell. This created an embryo that was used as a source of embryonic stem cells.

2009 - Jurassic Park or Pet Sematary?

Cloning endangered species wasn’t the end game - next on the horizon was the resurrection of the dead. Goats were used as egg donors and surrogates for the genes of the extinct bucardo, a type of Spanish mountain goat. The first goat kid died due to a lung defect, but for a brief moment, the species was brought back to life. To this day, Professor Hwang Woo-Suk and his team in Siberia are attempting to resurrect the woolly mammoth after several thousand years of extinction!

Today - Battling the Law

The UK was one country to vote against the UN’s decision to create a non-binding global ban on human cloning in 2004. Because this is a non-binding ban, we can still continue our research - but cloning is currently only allowed for therapeutic reasons, such as stem-cell research and organ printing. Reproductive cloning of humans is still off the table. So... no living, breathing human clones for the time being.

So, what's the future for cloning? It seems like creating an army of clones or getting that identical twin you’ve always wanted is still the stuff of science fiction - for now. But the tools and knowledge we have mean there’s just no telling where cloning might lead us...

And hey, you never know, since we're starting to figure out how to create things from our wildest sci-fi fantasies, maybe one of these days some mad scientist will show up with his own army of clones. Scary, but at least then we'd know it's possible...

See you all tomorrow.

Buh-bye.