Genetics

Essay by liquid13College, UndergraduateB, October 2004

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Today's technology develops so quickly that many impossible things become true; the cloning technology is the example. What is cloning? Cloning is a process used to create an exact copy of a mammal by using the complete genetic material of a regular body cell. Different from the common propagate, cloning need only one cell and without sex. In 1997, the great news shocked the whole world that the British scientists created a lamp named Dolly from a single cell, miraculously; the cell had been taken from the udder of adult sheep, which show the first cloning experiment was successful.

The history of cloning

About the cloning history, we trace back to 400 million years BC, the plants could clone themselves but not to long. The human found the cloning 200 years ago, the first person who did the cloning experiment is a German biologist named Han Spermann, he uses the egg white to clone chicken in 1938 but it was failed.

Until 1981, Kal Illmensee and Peter Hoppe report that they clone normal mice and embryo cell; it was a huge progress of the cloning history. After 2 years, the embryologists in UAS first cloned the human's cells; they put 32 cells into a surrogate mother, and then have cloned 4 extra same cells. In 1997, Ian Wilmut and his colleague Keith Campbell cloned a new adult sheep called Dolly. (Will, April 2002) So human spends long time on cloning research.

The process of cloning

The cloning has two main parts, one is the plant cloning and the other is the animal cloning. One type of plant cloning naturally occurs when a plant grows a runner. The runner grows horizontally across the ground forming a carbon copy of that same plant at the end. Eventually the runner dies and the...