Obi Wan: WE'RE UNDER ATTACK!
Luke: TAKE COVER BEHIND THE SHEEP!
Anakin: Quick, Luke, clone a sheep army!
Luke: What's a clone again?
Anakin: A copy of another organism!
Luke: Oh. Okay.
Yoda: Now, have a meeting and discuss cloning we shall. A subject usually associated with science fiction cloning is, yet in real life can it be done.
Anakin: How? I thought that only worked in our movies.
Obi Wan: Well, lets get back to the roots of cloning. The first evidence of cloning was thousands of years ago, when man cut pieces off of plants and planted them in the ground. This process is called "cutting." The next step happened way later, actually somewhat recently.
Scientists figured out how to clone animals by splitting an embryo to produce two identical organisms. In Scotland in the 1990's, though, scientists finally cloned an animal from an adult cell, which had never been done before. The animal that had been cloned was a sheep, and it was named Dolly. Many animals had been cloned before this, such as cows, cats, and pigs, but never from adult cells. The process to clone Dolly took three female sheep. An egg cell was taken from sheep #1 and enucleated, or had the nucleus taken out of it. Then, the nucleus from the cell of sheep #2's udder was put into the empty egg cell from sheep #1. The egg cell was then put into the uterus of sheep #3, and Dolly was born!Quick fact: Cloning may eventually be able to bring back extinct animals, such as the woolly mammoth, but nobody has done that yet.
Many animals have been cloned, but not any people. This is because it raises serious ethical concerns, since a human being is going to be made in a laboratory instead of naturally. Many people are against human cloning. I think human's shouldn't be cloned, since one human would live a normal life and the clone would be studied and experimented on, and that could be stressful, since they're still a living being.
Well, that's it for today on the Scientific Waffle. Bye!
Links:
Clone Trooper Dancing Gif
Sheep Picture
Lots of Sheep Picture
Nucleus Picture
Brainpop: Cloning (If you have an account)
Brainpop: Dolly the Sheep (If you have an account)
