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| Dolly, the Sheep from The Telegraph |
The most popular sheep that you will ever hear about or you already known about is Dolly. But why Dolly is so famous? The surprising reason behind the Dolly’s stardom is her birth. Dolly was not born as the other regular sheep born; she was a carbon copy of her mother. Interesting right, image yourself as if you look exactly like your mom or your dad. In other words, Dolly was a twin of her mother. In the real world if you have twin brother or sister they will be of your age, but Dolly was six years younger than her mother. In a reproduction process of any animals have both father and mother; at least the animals we know in our day to day life have both father and mother. But Dolly was the first mammal who was born by only one parent. In the real world this is not possible, but in the world of science, this is possible by the process of Cloning.
Now, what does this Cloning mean?
Cloning is a process by which an exact and identical copy of original can be made. Our body is made up of the cell. Cells have many important chemicals (materials) present in it to function our body. The most important part of the cell is DNA (deoxy-ribonucleic-acid), it holds all the information that our body needs to function and transfer to one cell to other. This information is called genetic code. We are grown up with the single cell which has half of the genetic information from father and half from the mother. This is called egg cell. This cell then divides billion times to form the similar cell to develop human or any animal body. For cloning process, we just need an egg cell.
For the process of cloning, the scientist took a DNA from the animal cell they want to clone and set apart the DNA and cell. Now they took an egg cell from some other animal and separate the DNA from the cell. Then they took the empty cell and placed the interesting DNA into the cell. And let that cell developed in the lab for six to seven days depending on the animals you want to clone. After the cell develops, the developed cell is placed into surrogate mother’s womb (figure 2).
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| Figure 2, Cloning Encyclopedia |
This is how Dolly, the sheep was born after 148 days in 1996. Dolly gave birth to six lamps, proving that cloned animals can reproduction. But she soon died in 2003 at the age of six. Usually, any regular sheep can live up to 11 to 12 years. But Dolly died very early age due to lung diseases. Many people claimed that it was because she was cloned, but scientists disagree with that.
The question arises why we want to clone any animal?
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| Figure 3, Mammoth from Bering Land Bridge |
Now if you think that you want to bring back your favorite dog or cat back with the process of cloning, you need to wait for a minute and think. Is that cloning that easy, is there a consequence? If not then why did Dolly died so early? In the process of cloning, we developed the cell outside the mother’s womb, so the age of any clone animals is less than the parent animal. This might be one of the reasons of Dolly’s death. Then when you play with the DNA or any small things there is the very larger probability of damaging the DNA. When you damage the DNA, you damage the cells and in result cell become weak and disease is welcomed in our body.
In short cloning is a process where we tinker with the nature world. As we all know what happen in the Jurassic park movie. After some point, we may lose control over the situation and end up taking lives of the people.
Dasgupta, A. (n.d.). What is Cloning?. Pitara. Retrieved from
Elizabeth, R. (2011, April 1). Interesting Facts about Human Cloning. Bright hub. Retrieved
Quinonez, N. (2014, May 26). The Pros and Cons of Cloning: Is it Worth the Risk?. Udemy.
Retrieved from https://blog.udemy.com/pros-and-cons-of-cloning/
Reference
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