By
Prashant Patel
By
Prashant Patel
A clear description of Cloning is the basic process of inserting a foreign DNA carrying instructions for valuable enzyme, hormone, or protein into the DNA carrying instructions for a valuable enzyme, hormone, or protien into the DNA of some other organism, so that the host organism makes the desired protien at the same time it makes its own. Cloning is the production of one or more individual plants or animals that are genetically identical to another plant or animal. In the summer of 1995 the birth of two lambs at Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in Midlothian, Scotland, herarlded what many scientists beleive will be a period of revolutionary opportunities in biology and medicine. Megan and Morgan, both carried to term by a surrogate mother. They were not produced from the union of a sperm and an egg. Rather their genetic material came from cultured cells originally derived from a nine day old embryo. That made Megan and Morgan genetic copies, or clones, of the embryo.Before the arrival of lambs, researchers had already learned how to produce sheep, cattle and other animals by genetically copying cells painstakingly isolated from early stage embryos. Their work promised to make cloning vastly more practical, because cultured cells are relatively easy to work with. Megan and Morgan proved that even though such cells are partially specialized, or differentiated.
They went to clone animals from cultured cells taken from a 26-day old fetus and from a mature ewe. The ewe's cell gave rise to Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult. Dolly was given a lot of attention because of a theoreticial possibility of cloning humans
