cloning is good or bad.give yours ideas
Answers
Answer:
its bad because may be because of it many species died
FEB. 25, 1997
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
More
Save
The startling news that scientists have cloned an adult sheep, producing a younger, genetically identical ''twin'' of the original, is a reminder that reproductive technologies are advancing far faster than our understanding of their ethical and social implications. Just a few years ago, researchers seemed confident that such cloning lay far in the future, giving ample time to wrestle with the consequences. Now a little-known team from Scotland has breached the barrier and entered a realm that fiction writers have long suggested is rife with potential for evil. The possibility of making carbon copies of humans is no longer quite so far-fetched.
What the scientists did was take a cell from an adult ewe, fuse it with another sheep's unfertilized egg from which the nucleus had been removed, and then jolt it with a spark of electricity to start the egg dividing into an embryo.
The immediate goal is to produce better animals for agriculture -- by cloning the best milk producers in a dairy herd, for example, or genetically altered animals whose milk would contain therapeutic proteins. Whether this will be a boon or a bust may depend on the economics. The long-term dangers are that cloning will reduce the genetic diversity of herds, rendering them more susceptible to wipeout by disease, and that cloning might inadvertently put a ceiling on future advances in animal husbandry. Traditional breeding produces better animals through mixing genes from two different parent animals to produce a specimen superior to both. Cloning might settle for copying the best existing animals.
The most troubling issues involve the potential for cloning adult humans. Nightmares envisioned in literature and popular entertainment have ranged from cloning dozens of Hitlers to cloning hordes of drones to perform menial work. Would some entrepreneur seek to clone enough Michael Jordans to make an unbeatable basketball dynasty? Would societies try to engineer a more ''perfect'' population by replicating geniuses or athletes or the most beautiful by current norms? Would a wealthy egomaniac want his legacy to be not a foundation or a university building, but a copy -- or multiple copies -- of his very own self?
The technology of the sheep cloning, though crude and not very effective at this point, appears straightforward and the cost moderate. Still, it is hard to escape the thought that most such experiments in humans could backfire, given the crucial role that environment plays in human development.
The mere thought of cloning provokes a revulsion in many people who see it as arrogant tinkering with Mother Nature and a dangerous interruption of the gene flow from which the human race has evolved. But in some respects the latest achievement is only a step beyond technologies already in use in animal husbandry, such as the genetic altering of animals to produce drugs or the cloning of animal embryos to produce multiple copies of cattle. Like most technologies, cloning is bound to have both virtues and vices. But before these advances get too far ahead of us, society will need to sort through what is acceptable and what is the nightmare beyond.