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It all started when Dr. Ian Wilmut and his team from the Roslin Institute created a lamb named Dolly. Dolly did not merely take after her biological mother, she was a carbon copy, a laboratory counterfeit so exact that she is in essence her mothers identical twin. So far so horrific, but that was only the beginning because if we could clone a lamb then why not...Dinosaurs! Because Steven Speilberg’s lawyers would have a field day with copyright. In truth the technology behind his Blockbuster Jurassic Park is kind of misleading, because if it was true then why haven’t we seen a living breathing T-Rex walking around eating Scientists head’s off? Because the DNA from a dead T-Rex would be useless, because its dead. But that’s not stopping Dr. Ryuzo Yanagimachi and his team from resurrecting a frozen-in-a-block-of-ice Mammoth. The key, says Dr. Ryuzo Yanagimachi, is whether or not scientists can extract chromosomes that are still intact. "As the temperature of permanent ice is perhaps not minus 100 degrees or lower, my hunch is that chromosomes in the mammoth's body cells are extensively damaged. I hope my prediction is wrong," says Yanagimachi, a scientist in Hawaii who heads one of the four research groups that have already submitted proposals for analysing the mammoth's DNA. "But even if DNA in body cells are degraded, sperm DNA may be fine," he added. "If sperm chromosomes are intact, we may be able to produce a mammoth-elephant hybrid." At least in theory, a pairing of mammoth sperm and the egg of an Asian elephant could produce an offspring. The resulting creature would be half-mammoth, half-elephant, but over time, selective breeding of mammoth-elephant hybrids might produce a nearly pure mammoth. In the best-case scenario, a mammoth hybrid could be born within two years -- the gestation period of an elephant. And life as we know it will be a Steven Spielberg movie.
Or a Jerry Springer one. If we could clone a frozen Mammoth why not your beloved pet cat or dog. Imagine if one day lil’ Butch got run over by a double decker bus, imagine if you could go to a company that specialises in cloning pets? Hey presto! Butch didn’t die after all, did you Butch? You didn’t get run over by a 208 did you boy? Is that you Butch? Can you remember me? Ow! Or something like that...
So far we’ve had a lamb, a Mammoth and a lil’ dog named Butch, but no villain. In comes Dr. Richard Seed into the mix. On December 5, 1997, Harvard graduate Richard Seed announced that he planned to clone a human being before any federal laws could be enacted to ban the process. Seed's announcement added fuel to the raging ethical debate on human cloning that had been sparked by Ian Wilmut’s creation of Dolly, the first clone obtained from adult cells. Seed's announcement went against President Clinton's 1997 proposal for a voluntary private moratorium against human cloning. While ethicists and religious figures have called human cloning the ultimate in blasphemy, the eccentric Seed views his efforts as a way to bring the human race one step closer to God. Seed is a bad guy. So who are the good guys? Murky subject this cloning, but we cant leave it alone can we? Once humans discover something (a habit that wont go away) they wont leave it alone until they know everything to do with the subject. So in this case it will only be a matter of time until some idiot somewhere clones his ex-girlfriend and...well you get the picture.
And now pushing science to the brink of altering humans, researchers have created the world's first genetically modified primate — a baby rhesus monkey with jellyfish DNA that glows green in the dark, no really. The Oregon Health Science University researchers who created ANDi (for "inserted DNA," spelled backward) said their goal is not to tinker with the human blueprint but to use monkeys in the laboratory to advance medical research and wipe out diseases. Yeah right, we all know they tried to create a David Beckham/Davina McCall hybrid. Jeeez those guys never learn.
So its only a matter of time before we clone each other. But cloning isn’t all bad, through experimenting on animals and of course each other we will find cures for degenerative diseases and stuff like that. Never mind all the crimes against nature we commit along the way coz it’ll be worth it. Once we’ve rid Mankind of degenerative diseases we could choose what kind of baby we would like to create. Yup designer babies will be something common, to people with shit loads of cash that is. Choose eye colour, make the baby strong and make him fluent in 5 languages and a genius when it comes to maths. Poor people will have to have babies the ‘old fashioned way’ and these ‘normal’ people will be discriminated against by the ‘perfect’ people. OK so I’m going all cynical-moody-bastard on you guys but it could happen. Just don’t blame me when your mate starts growing another leg and the X-Men comics become more popular than the Bible...
