Cloning Animals: Why Clone?

There are many reasons for why cloning is a part of our society. Cloning can be useful for medical reasons especially in stem cell research, livestock production, brining back extinct species, and most resent reason is to bring back a loved pet.

Cloning for Medical Purposes

Cloning to make stem cells-

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are capable of forming into other types of cells making them very important in curing diseases and making tissue. Our bodies make somatic stem cells that are limited to the types of differentiated cells they may transform into but embryotic stem cells have the ability to become any type of differentiated cell.

The ability to make and exact match of your own embryotic stem cells could lead to the cure of many diseases by replacing dead or diseased tissue with an exact copy of your healthy tissue with no risk of your body not rejecting the new tissue. This would be a form of therapeutic cloning.

Cloning for Models of Disease

Often times animals such as mice are used to model human diseases to enable us to create a cure or treatment. In order for us to do this we need many of these model of disease animals. We do this by genetically engineering and animals (mice for example) to carry disease-causing mutations in their genes. This process is very time consuming and takes trial and error and many generations. With cloning once the perfect model animal is produced it can be cloned to make many exact copies for more precise studies.

Drug Production

With cloning there is the possibility of creating animals that are resistant to specific diseases.Farm animals such as cows, sheep, and goats are being genetically engineered to produce drugs or proteins that are useful in medicine.

Cows for example could insert genes into the cows DNA that would allow the cow produce milk containing vaccinations or drugs.

Cloning Livestock

Cloning livestock would allow only the animals that produced the best and most meat, milk, eggs, or any animal product to be made over and over again, making sure the highest quality and largest quantity of animal products and being produced without having to worry about selective breeding and chancing not getting a quality animal.

Binging Back Extinct Species

With well-preserved DNA and a closely related species that could become an egg donor and a surrogate mother the possibility of brining back an extinct species like the Tasmanian devil or the Woolly mammoth is real. But with a lack of genetic diversity and without a male and female donor survival and reproduction would be difficult.

Cloning a Woolly Mammoth!