History
Cloning has long been around. Since the 1950’s cloning has been rapidly transforming the scientific fields. This subject is tabu to many politicians, society and even the scientific field, yet it continues to change and be introduced into the 21st century at an amazing rate. A brief history of cloning is listed below:
1952 Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King transplant nucleus from frog embryo to unfertilized oocyte. This became the technical prototype for cloning.
1966 Marshall Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana separately crack the genetic code that cells use to translate the series of bases in heir DNA into instructions for the production of thousands of proteins that do
the cell's work.
1997 A bill was brought before the US Senate to make cloning a crime
1997 Dr. Iwan Wilmut of UK announced the cloning of a sheep know as Dolly, who at the time of the announcement was already 7 months old.
1997 Reaction from President Bill Clinton was to ban cloning
1998 Richard Seed announced his work to begin human cloning. Also across the world, scientists at University in Korea successfully removed DNA from a 30 year old woman and inserted it into a somatic cell. The goal for cloning humans at this facility is for organ transplant. They did not implant into the human due to ethical reasons.
2003 Members of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announce the essential completion of a blueprint of the human genetic code. The group, along with a competing private effort, completed a rough draft of the genome in 2000, but that draft included thousands of gaps in the long sequence of DNA base pairs. Now all but 400 of those gaps have been closed.
Cloning Techniques
There are three main techniques used for cloning: Nuclear Transfer - Two cells, a donor cell and an oocyte, or egg cell. Research has proven that the egg cell works best if it is unfertilized, because it is more likely to accept the donor nucleus as its own. Roslin...