February 24, 1997 About eight months ago, in Scotland, a very special little lamb was born. This lamb had no mother and father, as we commonly think of a mother and father getting together to conceive. This lamb was created by taking some DNA out of a live sheep, sheep number 1, then removing an egg from a second sheep and removing the nucleus, which contains the DNA, and insert the DNA from the original sheep into the egg. Now the egg with the new DNA was implanted into another sheep where it proceeded to split and was finally born into the world, an exact duplicate of the original sheep.
To the public this has been a big story, to the scientific community it was just another step in the quest for knowledge. The Christian community thinks that this is playing with God's creations and should be banned. The ethical questions, at least in this country and the Christian countries, are huge. The religious leaders now really have something more to worry about, the cloning of humans. The "Brave New World" is upon us.
I am going to go into all kinds of possibilities that might be possible by cloning humans but first take the following into your thinking. Maybe when you read and consider the following points you will understand that what we are doing scientifically s nothing new to mother nature, she has been doing it for years - its called twins. And these twins will carry the same similarities and differences that todays twins might show depending partly on the environment they were raised in.
Now lets get into some of the things that have been talked about in this discussion. Remember always that, to begin with, we have a human baby that has all of those rights of any individual.
From here on we are talking about IF's. OK. They are things to think about at this point in time that would require massive changes in laws, ethics and religious beliefs to ever come true. That is not to say that one ruler in one country could not dictate these things to happen.
One could go on and on in the possibilities of the use of clones. Can these things happen - today never, tomorrow in some country maybe, in the far future a strong possibility.
A more interesting part of this would be the preservation of DNA from animals that are headed to extinction. If we took DNA from the Panda we would always be able to continue its presence on this earth. How about the beautiful Bengal tiger, the African elephant, and all those other listed mammals - we never have to worry about them again.
Can we bring back the Dinosaurs??? Frankenstein reincarnated!!!
