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
Ethical concerns have a lot to do with it.
I’ve never done any research into genetics or cloning but as a biologist I have friends who work in those sports of fields, and they’re not necessarily onboard with diving into that.
Dolly the Sheep [died from a virus-induced lung cancer common in sheep kept indoors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)#Death), which she was due to being an experimental animal. Several other sheep in her flock also died from the same type of cancer. Further experiments with cloned sheep have not yielded any evidence of clones suffering from advanced age-related conditions. Baseless theories to the contrary were however reported widely in the media at the time of Dolly’s death and have remained in the popular consciousness ever since. It was even accepted as a fact in biology class when I was in high school.
Lots of great points here around clone crops and the general goal of organ cloning but I want to add the risk of cloning on a larger scale, especially with more complex organisms.
It’s already a bit of a dnger with plants but imagine if cloning beef cows became cheaper than breeding. This is unlikely but we’ll roll with it.
You’ve cloned a whole herd from a single cow, you’ve now got a full herd from nothing without having to slowly build it up, which is great! Except that one cow was a little susceptible to a new cow flu variant just by chance. Where once that might have meant losing a few from the herd, now you could conceivably lose the entire lot.
Monocultures have already become an issue in large scale forestation efforts, where planting huge forests of only one tree means if a disease that affects that species shows up, you lose massive areas of forest (happening in northern China).
So it’s not that useful as a technology. Instead, being able to clone your own liver for a transplant means there should be no rejection. The difficulty is in cloning just the organ and not the whole person (ethically messy, and youd need them to grow for years before… Well it’s not a good idea) since that’s hard and we still can’t grow organs in labs
>With so many potential uses why is it that nothing major has happened since Dolly the sheep?
Because that sheep was born “old”, basically with the same cellular age like the cloned sheep. That’s not helping anything.
There’s lots of cloning going on. You can get commercially cloned pets (cats, dogs, etc.)
I know a guy that clones horses and deer (big bucks). The very interesting thing about horse cloning is that the clones don’t always (or even often) look the same, because their markings (the white parts in their coat) are determined during fetal development.
I remember looking at a corral of about 20 or so horses that were all clones (this was about 9 years ago). There was a group of 4-5, none of which looked the same, he said were all clones of the same original horse, then he explained why they looked differently. I asked him how the horses got along, because they tend to have pecking orders and such like that. I was curious how the same 5 horses would determine their rankings and if there would be issues with them getting along, etc. He said, as far as he could tell, they got along great and no differently than non-cloned horses.
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