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
First off, in terms of farming, plants are cloned all the time. It’s amazingly easy, just take a cutting and keep it alive and it’ll will grow roots and become a new plant which is a clone of the original.
Cloning technology is alive and well, and making a positive therapeutic impact in modern medicine. We haven’t gotten to the point of growing a new liver in the lab for transplant yet (we’ll get there!), but one great example is an anticancer treatment called CAR T-cells. Killer T-cells are one of the immune defenses which kill invading pathogens. We can extract T-cells from a cancer patient, genetically modify them to enhance their ability to fight cancer, then clone the new T-cells and reintroduce them into the patient. These treatments are TREMENDOUSLY powerful, so much so that the primary side effects relate to them being TOO effective. These are most effective in blood cancers but researchers are working on making them effective against solid tumors as well. Many, many patients have been completely cured with what would have been a death sentence a few decades ago!
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