Cloning seems like it has the potential to cure disabilities and diseases, and also make farming easier. With so many potential uses why is it that nothing major has happened since Dolly the sheep?
In: 1789
It’s not that little progress has been made, but more that It’s not commercially available progress; Not all progress is useful.
For instance, CAR-T cell treatment (riveting title) is where we can extract Killer T-Cells, modify them, clone em, and readminister. Still hashing out how to get them to not kill the host afterwards, but they’re extremely effective at targeting cancer.
Cloning is used in Plant Farming, and has been long before Dolly. That’s effectively how we get bananas and the like. When you take a tree cutting, you’re basically just regrowing the same tree; For all intents and purposes, it’s a clone.
The problem with cloning in general though is that it creates a large lack of biodiversity. Lack of biodiversity means that sickness/infections spreads like wildfire. This actually happened with bananas a long while ago; we had to develop another variety because the old one died out.
With animal cloning, it’s just a lot easier to inseminate. Cloning would be cool, but it’s really expensive, and you have to control all the variables that a living mother would
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