By Jarrah Coe
Teacher: Jenifer Trewren
The following report discusses cloning. It will describe what cloning is. How it is carried out on both, plants and animals, why we would clone, and how this technology can be used in the farming industry. This report will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of cloning.
What is Cloning?
Cloning is the process of making one or even several organisms that are genetically identical to the donor. Cloning has been used for many years to produce plants (even growing a plant from a cutting is a type of cloning). The cloning of animals has been the subject of many scientists as well as scientific experiments for years, cloning only began to attract attention after the birth of the first clone, it was a sheep named Dolly which was born in 1997. After Dolly was cloned, many other animals have been cloned, including cows and mice.
The recent success in the science industry in regards to cloning has ignited fierce debates among the politicians, general public, and science professionals in the morality of cloning animals, plants and possibly humans.
How is Cloning carried out?
In a way people have been cloning plants for several thousand years now. E.g. when you get a leaf cutting from a plant and grow it into a new plant (vegetative propagation), you are actually making a clone of the original plant because the new plant has still got the exact same genes as the original plant. The way that vegetative propagation is that when you cut it the end of the cutting forms a large amount of non-specialized cells called a callus. If you have some luck on your side the callus will grow, divide and form various specialized cells including roots and stems, eventually...