Therapeutic Cloning essays

Therapeutic Cloning essays Cloning is to make an exact duplicate of something or someone. It is unfortunate that when most people think of the word clone they immediately think of horror movies and the cloning of human monsters, well thats not the case in reality. Cloning is actually very different from that point of view. There are three types of human cloning, all three with very different procedures and goals: embryo cloning, adult DNA cloning, and therapeutic cloning. Therapeutic cloning involves growing replacement organs such as a heart, liver, pancreas, or skin from a sample of a persons DNA. The procedure that would have to be done to accomplish this would involve the use of a human embryo that has been modified by cell nuclear replacement, and the extraction of the embryos stem cells. Therapeutic cloning has not yet been accomplished in a laboratory or clinic. However, a general approach in the future has been put together. It would involve a multiple step process: A DNA sample would be taken from a sick patient; the sample would be inserted into an embryo in place of the original DNA the embryo would be allowed to grow for around two weeks; the stem cells would be removed from the embryo (this is the destructive and controversial step, the embryo would be killed in the process); the stem cells would be encouraged to grow in different ways into whatever tissue or organ is needed by the patient. The stem cells are a unique form of a human ce ll that can theoretically develop into any organ or body parts of the body; then the tissue or organ would be transplanted into the patient. This sounds like the answere to many problems but there are still four major hurdles to overcome before the first useful results may be obtained, those being: stem cells must be successfully isolated and grown in a laboratory; They have to be encouraged to grow into specific cells types (which has been done for most of the 220 possible cell ty...