What Are the Risks of Cloning?

Although there was much speculation after the birth of Dolly, the first cloned mammal in 1997, the scientific community has constantly raised new questions about where this technology is going. Were there people in the cloning projects? After so many years after Dolly was girthed, the risks of genetic cloning have become very clear. This article contains information about the risks and dangers of cloning.

A bioengineering company called AquaBounty sought to get its genetically modified salmon approved by the FDA. Although fish can grow twice as fast as natural salmon and it is said to have the same taste. The risks of human consumption are not yet clear, and there are fears that it will run off and breed with natural salmon. Cloning is the process of creating living organisms that are genetic copies of each other or, in other words, created from the same DNA. Hans Spemann, a German scientist, succeeded in creating artificial embryos in 1935, winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his efforts. He developed a method known today as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, which paves the way for future advances in cloning. However, the real breakthrough came with the creation of Dolly by geneticists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. Dolly, who was apparently healthy at birth, had arthritis and lung cancer at an early age and had to be quitted in 2003. Cloning has raised some difficult questions about its practical applications and also about whether it can be done or not.

Risks

While cloning has been widely recognized as an innovative process, there are certain dangers presented and these are:

Inefficient process

Failure rates: Cloning is not an easy process. It requires large investments and painstaking dedication to technology. Failure rates have been reported to be as high as 97%. Even Dolly was successfully cloned after 276 attempts, resulting in 29 viable embryos, of which only 3 survived and eventually only one was born. From the production standpoint, hundreds of attempts to create a single animal have simply been ineffective and have not worked.

Incompatibility: In Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, a cell is stripped of its genetic material, implanted with the nucleus of another organism, and made into an embryo. The process can easily fail if the host cell rejects the foreign nucleus, stability is achieved after many attempts.

Maternity issues: Even if the cell and nucleus have been successfully implanted, the embryo is often compromised during the pregnancy itself. It has often been observed that further development inside the embryo stops after implantation.

Genetic anomalies

Gene expression: Although clones are genetically similar, there are uncertainties as to whether the correct cistron (gene) will be expressed at the right time. It is important to note that when performing a cloning process, the transferred nucleus must be reprogrammed to give the impression that it belongs to an early cell.

Gene programming: Compared to a naturally created embryo, the transferred nucleus behaves as programmed by the scientist. However, in a naturally created embryo, there are different programs for each differentiated cell to which the DNA expresses the gene. Thus, the programming of the transferred kernel is only in the hands of the scientist and it is up to him to make the transferred nucleus act like a natural nucleus.

Trouble growing up

Lifespan: In most cases, cloned animals have been found to have less lifetimes than their counterparts. Dolly died at the age of 6, whereas normal sheep can live up to almost twice that age. Also, cloned animals are known to die suddenly and for no apparent reason. Investigation of this phenomenon has revealed little, except that it may be the result of genetic abnormalities.

Large brood dendroma: Since Dolly, other animals have undergone cloning procedures with some success, but over time scientists have observed a condition they often call “Big Child Syndrome.” Clones with such a condition have large, abnormal organs. This can effectively interrupt metabolic activities in the clone, causing critical organ failure and death. There are also clones that do not have LOS, but they develop life-threatening malformations in the brain and kidney as they age.

Contracted telomeres

Telomeres are DNA strings located at the ends of a chromosome. The length of these telomeres determines an animal’s lifespan and gets shorter as they age. It has also been observed that telomeres shrink when DNA is replicated repeatedly, this is a central process of cloning, and there are fears that if an animal takes an old nucleus as part of the cell transfer procedure, it will already have short telomeres. This may be the reason why cloned animals shorten their lifespan. However, the experiments do not give correct results. Surprisingly, a cloned cow and a mouse proved to have relatively longer telomeres than their counterparts. While the cells of these animals promised to have a normal life span, in Dolly the telomeres seemed to shrink, causing aging faster than normal sheep.

Social and ethical issues

Many religious and social organizations objected to cloning, be it for therapeutic or reproductive purposes. The view is that when an embryo is formed, life is the beginning, and using hundreds of embryos in the process of cloning is the immoral destruction of God-given life. The Catholic Church took a firm stand against cloning and wanted stricter regulations for such technologies. Even if a human is to be cloned in the near future, would it be morally correct to expose that person to such uncertainties, seeing how risky the process is? How does society interact with a cloned individual? Is there any possibility of discrimination against them? These are questions that need to be answered when it comes to human cloning, and unless the procedure itself appears to be flawless, human cloning should not be done as scientists may or may wish to do. Animal cloning is also controversial because many people believe that if animals suffer from genetic abnormalities, they should not have been created in the first place.

As you can see, cloning as a science has a long way to go to perfect itself, and there are many issues that need to be addressed, both technologically and socioeconomically. The future of cloning technology depends on its viability and how it can help society. The field of stem cell research may already have lost its foundation, as scientists do not need to clone and give birth today to harness the potential of stem cells. They only use this process to isolate human stem cells from cloned embryos to cure diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Reproductive cloning is losing popularity due to its complexity and failure rates far beyond what is economically feasible. Although there are rare claims of successful human cloning, they are unproven or published in peer-reviewed journals.