Dolly the Sheep

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Case Study Area: Dolly the sheep is a case about assisted reproduction. The case involves reproductive cloning which caused lots of controversy in science and ethics. KC
Summary:
Dolly the sheep is the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell ("Cloning Dolly the sheep"). Dolly was produced at the Roslin Institute in the UK in 1996. A clone has identical genetic configuration derived asexually from a single organism (Wadhawan, and Singh 16). The development of Dolly the sheep from an adult cell was a major achievement because it demonstrated that the DNA from adult cells can be used to create an organism, rather than embryonic cells being used to do this ("Cloning Dolly the sheep"). Dolly was developed from 277 cell fusions leading to only 29 developed embryos implanted into 13 surrogate mothers of whom only one went through a full term pregnancy ("Cloning Dolly the sheep"). The cloning of Dolly the sheep proved that cloned animals can reproduce naturally ("Cloning Dolly the sheep"). Though, Dolly only lived six and a half years, about half of the life expectancy of sheep. She suffered from arthritis and a virus in the lungs due to living indoors ("Cloning Dolly the sheep"). Since the birth of Dolly, cloning has been used to produce other mammals such as mice, pigs, cats, cows, and a mule (Wadhawan, and Singh 18). Cloning of these mammals will no doubt eventually lead to the cloning of humans (“Dolly’s Legacy”). This is a particular subject which causes a lot of controversy about cloning. While Canada along with more than thirty other countries has banned human cloning, the United States have still not passed any legislation on the subject (Wadhawan, and Singh 19). There are many benefits of cloning humans. For example, infer...

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...roperty and criminal matters. The greatest ethical issue concerning cloning is that the subject may be unnecessarily harmed, either during experiments or by expectations after birth. Given that this whole technology of cloning is still relatively new, safety issues may arise. As mentioned earlier, it took 227 attempts to produce one healthy Dolly. Furthermore, more deaths and developmental abnormalities have been reported as effect of experimentation. Secondly, at the level of human rights, human cloning may violate two very important principles on which human rights are based on. The first one is the principle of equality between individuals and the second one is the principle of non-discrimination between individuals. Some people worry that clones will be ill-treated and may suffer from mental and emotional problems due to lack of individuality and self autonomy.

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