(link: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/23/us/scientist-reports-first-cloning-ever-of-adult-mammal.html?scp=8&sq=sheep+cloned&st=nyt )
News reached the public for the first time that such a feat was possible... and immediately, debates over the ethics of cloning and the potential for human cloning arose. But even then, Ian Wilmut, one of the leading scientists in the team from Roslin Institute in Edinburgh that succeeded in creating the cloned sheep Dolly, told the press that: ''What this will mostly be used for is to produce more health care products.... It will enable us to study genetic diseases for which there is presently no cure and track down the mechanisms that are involved. The next step is to use the cells in culture in the lab and target genetic changes into that culture.''Wilmut, as it turns out, was spot on. Today, researchers and scientists are generally much more interested in DNA and gene cloning than in reproductive cloning. DNA and gene cloning hold much more potential for being therapeutically useful, as Wilmut foresaw. However, the public tends to be more excited by and worked up about reproductive cloning, partially because the media often sensationalizes this type of cloning.
As I just mentioned, DNA and gene cloning can be particularly useful in medicine. Specific genes or portions of DNA that code for a desired protein (or that are closely correlated to desired phenotypes) may be isolated and cloned. When the population of cloned DNA is then inserted into a vector or host cell, it will be replicated along with the host DNA, and the coded for protein or trait will, ideally be expressed. As we will see as this blog progresses, this very basic idea of gene cloning and DNA recombination could have wide-ranging therapeutic benefits. But the process is not without critics, and we will explore the opinions of those opposed to cloning as well.
C. Heard
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