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Clone. It’s a word I’m sure we’ve all heard bandied about, whether it’s on the telly-box, in some blockbuster film, or just being debated in the local pub by an elderly, drunk man with little memory of the sixties. But exactly what do we know about cloning?
For pop culture references we need go no further than George Lucas's very own cash-cow, Star Wars. Here we have whole armies of clones running around, shooting this, shouting at that, and blowing up the other. Then there’s The Island, where Sean Bean breeds clones for the rich and powerful to harvest their organs. But this is all very science fiction, and I can assure you that none of the labs I have worked in have any of that malarkey going on. Although I’ve never looked behind all the doors, so you can never be certain…
The thing is that the term ‘clone’ has become something of a buzzword, and I know that when I hear it I can’t help but think of sci-fi scenes. Yet, what people generally fail to realise is that the concept of cloning is far from a new idea. In its simplest definition, cloning is the process of making an identical copy of something. The science fact of the matter is this: cloning is a natural process.
Imagine a simple bacterium that reproduces asexually. It’s happily just reproducing away all the livelong day, and generally being quite the bacterium about town.
Consider reproduction. Just for a moment. Reproduction in humans is something… Well, it’s something I’m sure we all endeavour to enjoy. Enough of that. Not all of the organisms out there get to have as much fun as us. Of course, I refer to asexual reproduction, the process whereby parent organisms can produce genetically identical copies of themselves, i.e. clones. It’s a process fraught with danger, to be honest. This is due to one point: the lack of genetic variation. Our differences are what make us stronger as a species.
Imagine a simple bacterium that reproduces asexually. It’s happily just reproducing away all the livelong day, and generally being quite the bacterium about town. Then along comes a pesky human armed with an antibiotic that the bacterium carries no resistance for. The bacterium dies, but surely his fellow bacteria can shoulder the burden together and pull through… But they are all genetically identical to the original and consequently also have no resistance. Game over. There are of course good points for cloning in reproduction such as the ability to rapidly generate high numbers of offspring, however the lack of genetic variation is ultimately a costly thing. Yet there we have it: cloning in the natural world.
But what of us cloning other things? Surely now we approach the science fiction? Well, sadly not. For you see we have been cloning complex organisms for quite some time. And who has been conducting this futuristic science? Gardeners. For hundreds of years we have been practicing cloning with plants, be it as simple as merely taking a cutting and then from this growing a new plant, which is genetically identical to the original.
It’s not rocket science. It’s gardening.
In 1996, however, the biological world was rocked. The first ever mammal was successfully cloned and her name was Dolly. She was a sheep. The work with Dolly was conducted at the Roslin Institute, and it was all rather clever. They took an unfertilized egg cell and removing the genetic information from it. Then they took a normal cell from a different sheep and moved its genetic information into this egg cell, thus fertilizing it. It was implanted into a surrogate mother and left to grow naturally. The result was a clone of the sheep that donated the genetic information.
Success! Or was it? Not only was she only one of over 250 failed attempts, but also she died an early death at only seven years old. It was said that she showed signs of premature aging, which could be a result of her receiving ‘old’ DNA from the adult donor sheep. In some ways Dolly raised more questions than she answered.
However it was a step in the right direction as regards to cloning, with many other animals being cloned since. In this world of ever-improving technology, and seemingly increasing understanding, perhaps one-day humans ourselves could be cloned. This naturally raises the alarms of morals and ethics that I won’t enter into here. Instead I’ll leave you with this thought: imagine if Ruby Wax got her hands on cloning technology. Terrifying.
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