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We speak student!

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Molecular Genetics

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Cloning Animals

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A la Shmoop

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We're talking biology with Dr. Ruth Tennen

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and we're gonna talk now about biotechnology.

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Okay, so, walk us through how scientists clone animals.

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'Cause it just sounds so cool.

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Yes, it does sound cool.

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So, it's the Dolly idea, basically.

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- We've all heard about the sheep. - The sheep.

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Yep. And the basic process is called nuclear transplantation.

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This is how most scientists would do it.

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So you start off with an egg.

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And you empty out the DNA from that egg.

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So you end up with what's called an enucleated egg,

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because there's no nucleus.

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And then you take a differentiated cell,

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which basically means, you know, it's a skin cell,

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or a heart cell. It's become something; it's a mature cell.

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You take the DNA from that differentiated cell,

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and you insert it into that empty egg.

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So, basically, you have turned that egg into,

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essentially, a fertilized egg.

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You basically take that egg,

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you would allow it to develop into an embryo

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in a petri dish, and then you'd put it into a surrogate mom -

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so like a surrogate sheep mom -

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allow it to develop,

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and then you'd be born with basically a genetically identical

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version of whatever organism you started with.

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[ sheep baaing ]

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So why can't we do that with humans?

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So, there are definitely technical hurdles.

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I think the bigger hurdles are, like, moral and ethical things.

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It's possible people are working on that stuff,

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but there are, like, major international laws

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to prevent such things from happening right now.

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And I think that there's also always issues with, like,

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who's gonna have access to the technology.

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And it's really only gonna be part of the population.

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And then does that cause inequalities and things like that?

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So there's a lot of ethical issues.

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All right, so, back into the real world.

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You know, obviously, there are good reasons

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to clone animals.

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And it's almost cloning and breeding.

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- It's, I guess, a combined partnership. - Mm-hmm. Yep.

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How does that work? Like, give us some examples

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for what the state of the art is for cloning animals

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and breeding and, kind of, creating them.

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Yeah, so, there's a few reasons

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that people are cloning animals now.

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So, one is -- So, when we make animal models of disease -

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so let's say we want a mouse model of some human disease -

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it can take a long time to do that by breeding.

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Because you have to introduce multiple mutations

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and you have to cross all the mice and everything.

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If you could -- If you had a mouse and you could just

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make a new version of that same mouse

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without having to do all that breeding,

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that would be a huge time saver. So that's one thing.

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Definitely, if you had, you know, some sort of

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livestock that had a particular trait that you were interested in,

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- it's easier, probably, to clone than to breed that. - Sure.

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People are actually -- There's a big market for

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bringing back extinct animals

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- Yeah, Re-Animator. Yeah. - Or deceased pets, also.

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- That was a great film. - Yep, so...

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- But go back to the mice thing. - Yep.

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What ethical issues arise when using animals for scientific experiments?

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I think right now, we don't have a whole lot of other alternatives.

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So it's either test this stuff on humans,

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and test a drug on humans without testing it on animals.

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Or you have to sacrifice some mice.

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And there are tons of regulations about how the mice are treated.

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You have to submit a protocol to make sure that

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you're humanely treating the animals.

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But there's like, you know, all the time there are people

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picketing outside of research universities saying,

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we shouldn't be doing these experiments on mice, so...

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- Yeah. - Some are problematic still. Yep.

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Hmm. Okay. Yeah, interesting ethical issues.

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[ whoop ]

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How do scientists clone animals?

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Why don't we clone humans?

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What are examples of cloning animals?

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What ethical issues arise when using animals for scientific experiments?

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[ eww ]

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