Cloning: The Promise of a Generation

Cloning isn’t worth the air which the hype is uttered in. As a medical technique, it has interesting potential and widespread ethical repercussions in the distant future, but all this is nothing compared to the global stem cell revolution of which it is just a chink in the chain.

A child who is born in this millennium is projected to live longer than any human being that has ever existed – on an average. Of course, short of unforeseeable and far-flung advances in the clinical sciences, the vast majority of us will still be afflicted by pathogenic and senescent illnesses. This is where cloning comes in, even though it’s nothing like what sci-fi blockbusters would have you imagine.

The True Picture

The most promising part of it all is the ability to clone tissues, as opposed to whole organisms. If we were to take a biopsy from an adult and attempt to clone them individually, the whole process would be impracticable. We need them to divide and grow in quantity on their own, but adult cells are specifically programmed not to do that. Those that break the rule and grow uncontrollably become cancerous.

All the cells in a fertilized egg are non-specialised, and scientists call them “stem cells” for this reason. They await chemical instructions from neighbouring tissues to know whether to “train” as a cardiac muscle, a neuron, or a blood cell.

And this is where cloning comes within the purview of stem cell research. By taking an adult’s genetic material and putting it into a hollowed egg, we have a fertilized egg that is completely compatible with the DNA donor’s body. This egg will then multiply in no time at all; giving rise to an abundance of stem cells that can be used to cure diseases.

This also happens to be the reason why first-time mothers now routinely save their child’s umbilical cord – it is full of stem cells as well, only without the need of cloning.