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
There have been a lot of progress in cloning in the last 20 years. There are a number of different animals being cloned for various reasons. Extinct animals are being cloned back from extinction, old variants of animals are being cloned to reduce the effect of inbreeding, animals are being cloned using edited genes to reduce genetical diseases and to produce favorable traits. There are even companies out there who can clone your pets for you, or even price winning livestock.
However you do not tend to hear so much about this in mainstream news. The Dolly cloning was not in the news for its scientific achievement but rather for the ethical dilema it presented. If scientists were able to clone mammals then they could likely clone humans as well. And that posed a huge ethical and political question. This was why everyone heard about Dolly the Sheep, as a backstory to the question of human cloning. The other cloning achievements are not as much talked about. In fact cloning have almost quietly become a mainstream part of our every day life. For example we are now cassualy talking about the possability of cloning human organs as part of medical treatments which is far more advanced then just cloning a human.
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