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 has been a lot of progress in fact. Nowadays you can pay to have your pet cloned, often as a replacement when the original dies. There is a lot of R&D between doing something new and it becoming part of common day life.
Cloning whole animals has at least a niche market. There is a South American polo player who had a pony (horse) that was so good that he had it cloned 20 times. Each is a little different, one is the fastest over the length of the field, one is the fastest over the first few strides, one turns the best, one tracks the ball best, so he uses them in different situations during a game, but they are all essentially the same great horse.
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
No clue, but as an only child who could use help with her aging parents, I’m sorely disappointed that I didn’t get the clone sister I asked for when this story broke.
I was 7. Dolly was the first major news story I remember and as a result, asked my parents to clone me so I’d have a twin sister. They had me later in life so having a baby sibling was out.
“They’re not cloning sheep. It’s the *same sheep*! I saw Harry Blackstone do that trick with two goats and a handkerchief on the old Dean Martin show!”
what makes you think little progress was made? do you really think theyd tell us if they clones super soldiers?
Because scientists realized that they should not be so obsessed with if they could, and asked themselves if they should
1. That cloned sheep got hit with the symptoms of aging much earlier in life than a naturally-born sheep, and eventually died of cancer.
2. A lot of agriculturally grown plants are clones. Cloning plants is very easy.
3. We use animal cloning all the time in research with cloned mice and cloned cells of various organisms including humans.
4. Cloning isn’t really there yet to be cheaper or easier than breeding livestock, and it’s not obvious if it ever will be, since livestock practically breeds itself.
5. Cloning not there yet for growing organs for transplants, although people are working on it and there’s plenty of progress.
Hey- disability isn’t something you ‘cure.’ We are all temporarily [however much] abled.
The world would be a pretty terrible place if we cloned a bunch of genetically “perfect” humans.
Two parts answers taht are both true.
It hasn’t stopped, you stopped hearing about it, because a natural sheep is way cheaper than a cloned sheep, so theres no real value to cloning yet
Progress has slowed because theres not enough value in cloning to incentivize learning.
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