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Asked by duckfaceclanman99 to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 12 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by amber13.
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Marcus Wilson answered on 12 Nov 2012:
I do loads of clonong at work, buts its probably not as exciting as what your thinking.
I take one single bit of DNA that contains one gene and “clone” it into other bits of DNA so i can look at what that one gene does.
Dolly the sheep was a clone, they took all the DNA from one cell of one sheep and put it in the egg of another sheep. Whether this means creating life im not sure, dolly is a replica but all the ingredients were already there.
really interestingly a couple of years ago a group of scientists ‘made’ life by chemically building DNA in the lab. They then put this into a bacteria with its own DNA in and made the bacteria get rid of its own old DNA, leaving only the new synthetic DNA. the bacteria grew quite happily. Does this mean creating life, what do you think?
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Adam Paige answered on 14 Nov 2012:
One kind of cloning that I have done in my work is I have taken cancer cells that have a broken gene inside them (it was a gene called WWOX) and then I have put a new version of the WWOX gene into them. I believed WWOX was a gene that would stop a cancer cell growing. We were able to show that this was correct.
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Louise Walkin answered on 18 Nov 2012:
You can make a clone – Dolly the Sheep is probably the worlds most famous sheep! However, there is still a lot that is not understood about cloning. Dolly has some severe problems and seemed to age very quickly. She did manage to have some baby lambs but she was very poorly before she died, and she had to be put down.
People have suggested that we could all have a clone in the future, then we wouldn’t need organ transplants etc however, some serious ethical issues come into play when you think about this. There was even a film made about it called “The Island,” it really made me think about what might happen if we all had clones. Scary!
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