Answer:
Explanation:
Twenty years ago this week, at the age of six months, Dolly the cloned sheep was unveiled to the world amid much controversy. Newspapers proclaimed the scientific community was "in an uproar"; others said the creation was "anticipated and dreaded" and the announcement prompted inevitable claims of human cloning being close to reality.
However, more than two decades since the sheep's "birth", full human clones are non-existent and cloning technology has remained, mostly, contained to scientific laboratories.
"When Dolly was announced, the media picked up on the fact we now have a clone and brought up science fiction-type scenarios, but the biology was really stunning," Lawrence Brody, from the National Human Genome Research Institute told WIRED. "The folks in Scotland had essentially figured out a way to reprogram the genome so it can make a whole organism, and renewed a very intense investigation into this area."
So where is the technology now, and, more importantly, where does it goes next?
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What is cloning?
"The term cloning describes a number of different processes that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a biological entity," explains the National Human Genome research group's website. At its simplest, cloning works by taking a genetic part of an organism and recreating it in another place.
Dolly was cloned using a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) which takes a somatic cell, such as a skin cell, and transfers its DNA to an egg cell with its nucleus removed. In the process, the DNA can be transferred by injection or through a process using electric currents.
Although revolutionary at the time, this method has since been largely superseded by the introduction of Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) , announced more than a decade ago. iPSCs are skin or blood cells that have been reprogrammed back into an embryonic-like pluripotent state, letting researchers develop them into any type of cell needed. For example, iPSCs can be used to treat diabetes, or iPSC blood cells can be used to create new blood free of cancer cells for a leukemia patient.
In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka, who is now a Nobel Prize winner, showed how mature cells in mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. A year later, research led by Drs. Kathrin Plath, William Lowry, Amander Clark, and April Pyle were among the first to create human iPSC.
"iPSCs have the potential to become multipurpose research and clinical tools to understand and model diseases, develop and screen candidate drugs, and deliver cell-replacement therapy to support regenerative medicine," researcher Charles Goldthwaite wrote about the potential of the method. iPSC stem cells can additionally be cre
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