Taking a Look at DNA Cloning

 By restriction enzymes then amplified by polymerase chain reaction to make many to millions of copies of a single fragment.

I am a sophomore at James Kenan High, I plan on graduating next year as a junior and attending UNC once I graduate. As part of a graduation requirement my school requires me to write a research paper on a topic of my interest. My graduation project is about cloning technology, specifically focused on how it will help fix genetic disorders and save seriously ill patients who have cancer, Alzheimer's or other illnesses. If you could provide some information on how you think cloning could help find a cure or at least find a better and more efficient treatment for patients with cancer and/or other diseases you feel like would benefit from cloning and since you are a pathologist how do you think cloning could affect diseases like

A restriction enzyme is an enzyme that acts as a catalyst that can cut a strand of DNA in a particular place.

Technology has changed our world for the better... or has it made our world worse? As technology changed(s), our ability to come up with new technological advances that we never thought possible, have become possible. At first the only cloning ever thought possible were the birth of twins, but now we can do more. Cloning has the potential to change the field of medicine, animal conservation and the meat and dairy industry, but even with all these beneficial achievements, some see cloning as a threat to the way we perceive the world. To understand the benefits of cloning, we must push aside their views and welcome a change in society.

As many movies and articles predict the future; how is one to know that they are not that far off from the truth. With new sciences continually coming out such as designer babies, cloning, and AI society must be cautious as to how far and what it discovers. With several stories as Frankenstein and Liar that portray how the sciences go wrong; one begins to wonder if this is story or an accurate prediction. Society needs to be cautious as it goes deeper into unknown sciences involving technology because pushing too hard can be harmful, it takes only time to bring up the worst and best, and once the line of morally correct is crossed into the darkness there is no return.

Currently, our society is at a point, where our knowledge and understanding of human, nature, and science are very controversial, yet many promote advancement in scientific technology like cloning as a benefit for humans. Human beings becoming Gods, and manipulating the DNA of animals, plants, bacteria, and humans, so large corporate developers can profit from hybrid creations. Eating from the metaphorical tree of the Knowledge of good and evil, listening to the evil one’s whispers that you shall not die. In addition, people have become smart enough to cause major problems to our society and future as living beings. I believe it is not coincidence that DNA and cloning began advancing around the same time as the Atom Bomb, because both the

In this case, the DNA is the only thing left of the organism, so the process of cutting it from the source does not necessarily need to be done. In the laboratory scientists will use the process of restriction enzymes to cut the DNA into smaller parts. The cuts are made at specific nucleotide sequences. Different restriction enzymes recognize and cut different sequences of DNA. Restriction enzymes work by matching up with a space that matches the restriction enzyme. The site that it matches up with is called the recognition site. The restriction enzyme wraps around the DNA, and it causes a break in both strands of the DNA molecule. Restriction enzymes are often used in the process of DNA cloning. (Biotechnology Learning Hub,

Cloning can occur naturally, but this mainly happens with bacteria. Bacteria does this thing that is called asexual reproduction and causes it to reproduce the exact same copy as before. “When they clone an animal, first they take skin cells from the animal to be cloned. Then, they take an unfertilized egg from the adult female of the same species and remove the nucleus of the egg which contains the other half of the DNA, leaving the mothers egg empty. After that they put the clone’s DNA into the female’s egg and that is how fertilization begins.” (Ades Jane)

The idea of cloning has been around for decades, and some scientist have even utilized this process. In the story Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the author presents the process of cloning by using hatcheries instead of natural reproduction, which no longer exists, to create individuals. Individuals in society are given different doses of lethal drugs to alter development so that they meet the standards based on their pre-determined social classes. The concept of cloning is used to propagate another organism or cell to create an exact copy of its original without the use of natural reproduction. This process has been very successful with the cloning of animals, cells, and even a recent human experiment. In the case of cloning, the power of

Enzymes are applied to DNA to break it into smaller pieces which are called restriction endonucleases. These restriction endonucleases become

The article by Leon Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance”, states that cloning is morally wrong because it puts humans in the place of God. Cloning used to not be a big problem because it was not possible, but with technological advances making it possible, it has become a moral problem. Kass addresses this problem in his article when he writes: “ In a world whose once-given natural boundaries are blurred by technological change and whose moral boundaries are seemingly up for grabs, it is much more difficult to make persuasive the still compelling case against cloning human beings” (18). People are eased into cloning through movies and TV shows. These forms of entertainment have made people more open to the idea of cloning. Over the

Imagine being able to cure diseases such as Parkinson’s or diabetes. Today, more than one million Americans live with Parkinson’s disease (Statistics on Parkinson’s) and over twenty-five million have been diagnosed with diabetes (Statistics about Diabetes). Cloning could offer a cure to these diseases and more. A clone is defined as an identical copy of an organism or cell, produced from the genetic material of a single organism (Cloning). Although the process of cloning is still developing, it is quickly becoming a reality.

“A clone is an identical genetic copy of a biological entity.” (LaPensee, 2012) Clones are defined as an identical genetic copy, however, clones do not always look identical. This is due to the different ways that genes are interpreted and the role the environment plays in how an organism develops (LaPensee, 2012). Although the term 'clone' was not used until 1963 in a speech, the investigation into genetics had begun much earlier with the work of August Weismann in the late 1880s (LaPensee, 2012). Weismann proposed that cell differentiation would reduce the genetic information contained within a cell. This theory pervaded until 1902 when the German embryologist Hans Spelmann showed how split salamander embryos could still grow to adulthood (LaPensee, 2012). The past of cloning has many significant events. The first significant event occurred in 1996 when Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues create the first cloned mammal, a sheep they named Dolly (Back Story, 2013). In 2001, President George W. Bush banned federal funding for research that uses stem cells, with the exception of a small number of existing cell lines. The decision severely restricted stem cell research in the US, this decision was reversed in 2009 by President Barack Obama (Back Story, 2013). A few years later, in 2011, researchers tried to create human embryonic stem cells using nuclear transfer, but the eggs would either stall out after only a few divisions or need an extra set of chromosomes to grow

DNA exists in all organisms on Earth, chemically DNA is the same, no matter where it is taken from, Bacteria, humans or even animals. DNA that is taken from these different organisms can be extracted and glued together, resulting in “recombinant DNA”, which bring together genetic material from multiple sources. There are two methods used to direct replication of DNA sequences, Molecular cloning and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The difference between them is that one method replicates within the living cell and the other is in a test tube. Vectors, which are derived from plasmids or viruses, are needed to form recombinant DNA. Recombinant DNA is found literally everywhere, from the Doctors’ office, vetenerian, laboratories, and even in

Another way of manipulating DNA is by cloning. Cloning is the production of exact copies of the original, kind of like a copying machine. With DNA molecules, cloning means putting new DNA into a