Celina Mae Revalde
THX 2013-63774
Cloning has been one of the most controversial things that science has
given the world. But what is cloning? In my own words and understanding, it is
basically copying the genes of a person to create another exact same person.
It’s like having a twin which looks exactly like you. The perfect replica of
you. But, what really is cloning? Cloning is the process of producing similar
populations of genetically identical individuals that occurs in nature. Clones
are organisms that are exact genetic copies. Every single bit of their DNA is
identical.
The first ever known clone was the one created from the sheep, Dolly.
And that was way back in 1997. We could only imagine how long scientists have
been studying about cloning. There are a lot of ways to clone and individual.
Actually there are two ways known so far. One is the Artificial Embryo
Twinning. It has the same process of creating twins but instead of growing the
baby in the mother’s womb, scientists grow them on petri dishes. The embryos
develop there for some time. After that, they are then placed inside the
surrogate mother where they finish their development. The second process is the
SCNT or the Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer. This uses a different approach than
artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result: an exact genetic
copy, or clone, of an individual. This was the method used to create Dolly the
Sheep. Scientists have been conducting experiments in laboratories and sad to
say, the process of cloning is not yet that successful. They have been trying to find ways to improve
and widen their knowledge about this. But, these past few years, their hard
work had paid off and they are now in great progress and are discovering a lot.
As what I have mentioned above, cloning is a very controversial issue. People
often ask the question, “Is cloning even ethical? Is it something that we
should study further into? Well it actually depends on the way you think. It
depends with what you believe in. I have my own opinion about this as a
Catholic but since we are not talking about the morality of the act of cloning
but the science of it, I am now going to share some recent news about the
cloning progress.
We all know that stem cell researchers are trying to look for ways to
lengthen at least a human’s capacity to live. If not, they are looking for
something great that could help the world. Here are some recent news that I
have found.
- · Largest ever trial of heart attack patients begins.
Using bone marrow stem cells to prolong
life
A total of 3,000 patients will be involved
in the trial to test whether life can be prolonged by administering stem cells
from the patient's own bone marrow. The stem cells are injected into the
patient's heart within 5 days of suffering a heart attack.
- · Reconstructing faces using human stem cells from fat.
Growing cartilage using stem cells taken
from the patient's fat
To do this, the doctors would take a small
sample of fat from the patient and extract stem cells from it. The stem cells
would then be placed onto a special ear-shaped scaffold, called a
"POSS-PCU nanoscaffold."
The cells are treated with chemicals that
encourage them to transform into cartilage cells, before being inserted under
the patient's skin.
This new version of the technique reduces
side effects and the chance of the new ear being rejected by the patient's
body. It also makes the treatment less invasive, as cartilage taken from the
patient's rib to build a scaffold does not grow back.
- · Ability to recreate heart muscle from scar tissue steps closer.
For their study, the team tried turning
scarring cells called fibroblasts, obtained from mouse embryos, into heart
muscle cells by growing them in gels of varying stiffness.
To begin the conversion of fibroblasts into
muscle cells, they infected them with a virus carrying genes expressed by stem
cells. These "transgenes" fooled the fibroblasts into behaving like
stem cells. Having a tight community of these progenitor cells may have helped
with the next step because when they are developing, heart muscle cells are
also cosy with their neighbors.
After a week of allowing the cells to
develop in the different gels, the researchers added a protein that spurs
growth of heart tissue by signaling to the progenitor cells to transform into
heart muscle cells.
A few days after this, some of the cell
colonies were contracting spontaneously, like colonies of heart muscle cells.
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