ARGUMENTITIVE PAPER Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

ARGUMENTITIVE PAPER - Essay Example The continued cloning of animals is essential because this method will provide a more substantial and beneficial food source for a growing world population as does the cloning of plants. However, the cloning of humans is not in societies or an individual’s best interest, at least not yet. On February 23, 1997 Ian Wilmut, a Scottish scientist, with his colleagues at the Roslin Institute announced the successful cloning of a sheep by a new method. The technique concerned transplanting the genetic material of an adult sheep into an egg from which the nucleus had been removed. The resulting birth of the sheep, Dolly, was another landmark in mankind’s ability to rule over nature. The birth of Dolly and â€Å"the fact that humans might someday be cloned, created from a single somatic cell without sexual reproduction, moved further away from science fiction and closer to a genuine scientific possibility† (Wilmut, 1997). The sheep experiment was different from prior endeavors in that it produced an animal that was a genetic twin of one adult sheep instead of being the identical offspring from a pair of adults. Dolly was the first successful clone of a mammal as the sheep contained the genetic material of just one parent. For more than 40 years, the practice of transferring a nucleus from a somatic cell into an egg using nuclei derivative from non-human embryonic and fetal cells continued. Evidence suggested genetic material contained in differentiated somatic cells may retain the potential to direct the development of healthy fertile adult animals. Biologists had examined whether, once cellular differentiation transpires, this process is reversible. However, until Dolly was born, the capacity to do so remained unproved. â€Å"The demonstration that nuclei from cells derived from an adult animal could be reprogrammed, or that the full genetic complement of such a cell could be