Article 1:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic
/cloning.htm
Article 2: What is Cloning?
Clones are organisms that are exact genetic copies. Every single bit of their DNA is identical.
Clones can happen naturally—identical twins are just one of many examples. Or they can be
made in the lab. Below, find out how natural identical twins are similar to and different from
clones made through modern cloning technologies.
How Is Cloning Done?
Many people first heard of cloning when Dolly the Sheep showed up on the scene in 1997.
Artificial cloning technologies have been around for much longer than Dolly, though.
There are two ways to make an exact genetic copy of an organism in a lab: artificial embryo
twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer.
1. Artificial Embryo Twinning
Artificial embryo twinning is a relatively low-tech way to make clones. As the name suggests,
this technique mimics the natural process that creates identical twins.
In nature, twins form very early in development when the embryo splits in two. Twinning
happens in the first days after egg and sperm join, while the embryo is made of just a small
number of unspecialized cells. Each half of the embryo continues dividing on its own, ultimately
developing into separate, complete individuals. Since they developed from the same fertilized
egg, the resulting individuals are genetically identical.
Artificial embryo twinning uses the same approach, but it is carried out in a Petri dish instead of
inside the mother. A very early embryo is separated into individual cells, which are allowed to
divide and develop for a short time in the Petri dish. The embryos are then placed into a
surrogate mother, where they finish developing. Again, since all the embryos came from the
same fertilized egg, they are genetically identical.
2. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer
Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), also called nuclear transfer, uses a different approach than
artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result: an exact genetic copy, or clone, of an
individual. This was the method used to create Dolly the Sheep.
What does SCNT mean? Let's take it apart:
Somatic cell: A somatic cell is any cell in the body other than sperm and egg, the two types of
reproductive cells. Reproductive cells are also called germ cells. In mammals, every somatic cell
has two complete sets of chromosomes, whereas the germ cells have only one complete set.
Nuclear: The nucleus is a compartment that holds the cell's DNA. The DNA is divided into
packages called chromosomes, and it contains all the information needed to form an organism.
It's small differences in our DNA that make each of us unique.
Transfer: Moving an object from one place to another. To make Dolly, researchers isolated
a somatic cell from an adult female sheep. Next they removed the nucleus and all of its DNA
from an egg cell. Then they transferredthe nucleus from the somatic cell to the egg cell. After a
couple of chemical tweaks, the egg cell, with its new nucleus, was behaving just like a freshly
fertilized egg. It developed into an embryo, which was implanted into a surrogate mother and
carried to term. (The transfer step is most often done using an electrical current to fuse the
membranes of the egg and the somatic cell.)
The lamb, Dolly, was an exact genetic replica of the adult female sheep that donated the somatic
cell. She was the first-ever mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.
Watch these videos of enucleation and nuclear transfer.
How does SCNT differ from the natural way of making an embryo?
Natural fertilization, where egg and sperm join, and SCNT both make the same thing: a dividing
ball of cells, called an embryo. So what exactly is the difference between the two?
An embryo's cells all have two complete sets of chromosomes. The difference between
fertilization and SCNT lies in where those two sets come from.
In fertilization, the sperm and egg have one set of chromosomes each. When the sperm and egg
join, they grow into an embryo with two sets—one from the father's sperm and one from the
mother's egg.
In SCNT, the egg cell's single set of chromosomes is removed. It is replaced by the nucleus from
a somatic cell, which already contains two complete sets of chromosomes. So, in the resulting
embryo, both sets of chromosomes come from the somatic cell.
Is cloning an organism the same as cloning a gene?
You may have heard about researchers cloning, or identifying, genes that are responsible for
various medical conditions or traits. What's the difference?
When scientists clone an organism, they are making an exact genetic copy of the whole
organism, as described above.
When scientists clone a gene, they isolate and make exact copies of just one of an organism's
genes. Cloning a gene usually involves copying the DNA sequence of that gene into a smaller,
more easily manipulated piece of DNA, such as a plasmid. This process makes it easier to study
the function of the individual gene in the laboratory.
Supported by a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) Grant No. R25RR016291 from the National Center for Research
Resources, a component of the NIH. The contents provided here are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily
represent the official views of NIH.
Article 3: Cloning comeback
Ten years ago, Woo Suk Hwang rose to the top of his field before fraud and dodgy
bioethical practices derailed his career. Can a scientific pariah redeem himself?
 David Cyranoski
14 January 2014
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Left: Ahn Young-joon/AP; Right: David Cyranoski
Snuppy, the first cloned dog (left), was one of Woo Suk Hwang’s successes. Today (right) Hwang regularly delivers
cloned animals at an institute near Seoul.
The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation nestles on a wooded hillside in Guro, a district on the
southwestern outskirts of Seoul. Spartan, quiet and cold on this winter day, the grey-white
exterior belies the buzz of activity within.
A door just off the foyer leads to a corridor of canine chaos. In stalls to the left, Tibetan mastiff
and Australian shepherd puppies are cavorting. A Yorkshire terrier dances back and forth on its
hind legs. And an adult mongrel howls with separation anxiety, only calming down when the two
beagle pups that she gave birth to are returned to her pen. She doesn’t know that she is just a
surrogate mother, nor that the pups are highly unusual dog clones, engineered to show the
symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
The right side of the corridor houses a wall-sized window that looks onto an operating theatre.
Inside, Woo Suk Hwang, in a blue surgeon’s gown, cap and mask, is working on a bitch in
labour. He greets his visitors through a microphone headset and then explains that this is an
emergency: one of the puppies is stuck in the cervix. He makes an incision and carefully probes
the dog’s womb until the whitish sausage of a puppy emerges. After it is wiped down, Hwang
holds it to his ear, listening for sounds of breathing. He then gently massages the groggy pup into
consciousness and goes back for the last one. Minutes later he announces: “We have saved all
three cloned dogs.” Hwang brims with pride.
Listen
The Nature Podcast investigates the return of Woo Suk Hwang
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Eight years ago, few could have imagined watching such a jubilant scene. Hwang, a worldfamous cloning researcher, had just plummeted from the pinnacle of scientific success, when it
became clear that he had committed fraud in two articles1, 2 describing stem-cell lines derived
from cloned human embryos. There had been gross ethical lapses in the way Hwang had
collected the human eggs for his experiments, and the papers were found to contain fabricated
data. They were eventually retracted. It was one of the most widely reported and universally
disappointing cases of scientific fraud in history. In January 2006, Un-chan Chung, then
president of Seoul National University (SNU), where Hwang had done the work, called the
episode “an unwashable blemish on the whole scientific community as well as our country”.
Clockwise from top left: Woo Suk Hwang/SNU/UPI Photo/Newscom; Lee Jae Won/Reuters; Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters; Shin Young-keun, Yonhap/AP;
David Cyranoski
Expand
If the stain cannot be washed away, perhaps it can be stamped out of memory by hundreds of
paws and hooves. With private funding from steadfast fans, Hwang opened Sooam in July 2006.
He has since cloned hundreds of animals — dogs, cows, pigs and coyotes. His goals include
producing drugs, curing diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, providing transplantable organs,
saving endangered species and relieving grief-stricken pet owners. He has a raft of publications
in respectable journals, collaborations within and outside South Korea, and increasing
institutional support from government agencies. It is hard to square this image with the pictures
of Hwang released by the South Korean media in 2005. Shattered by the controversy, he was
photographed in a hospital bed, unshaven and reportedly suffering from exhaustion.
Today Hwang plays down his involvement in the fraud. He retains a base of ardent supporters,
mostly in South Korea. And he maintains, contrary to scientific consensus, that he really did
create the first line of cloned human embryonic stem cells. He has even had success in getting
some legal recognition of that claim.
In December, he welcomed reporters into Sooam to tour the facilities and see him deliver some
cloned puppies, but he declined to comment for this story. Maybe “in a couple of decades”, he
wrote by e-mail.
Cloning for country
A veterinarian by training, Hwang rose to fame in South Korea in the late 1990s by cloning
animals — and by developing important allies (see ‘The rise and fall and rise of Woo Suk
Hwang’). He asked then-President Kim Dae-jung to name the first cloned beef bull, and he
promised a national agricultural boom centred on cloned cattle.
His popularity in South Korea grew, and in 2004 he shot to international fame
when Sciencepublished a paper1 in which he claimed to have created an embryonic-stem-cell line
from a cloned human embryo — something that several groups had been trying to do. Hwang’s
success seemed to offer an endless supply of versatile cells genetically matched to the cell donor.
Through this process, often called therapeutic cloning, it was hoped that doctors could rejuvenate
failing tissues or organs, or that cells derived from people with virtually any disease could be
used for research and drug screening. The following year, his group published a second paper2,
describing the development of 11 more such lines, making the process so routine that clinical
application seemed imminent.
But even as his star was rising, cracks were beginning to show. In May 2004, one of Hwang’s
graduate students told Nature that she had donated eggs for experiments in the first paper
(seeNature 429, 3; 2004). It was a controversial assertion: many bioethicists worry that, in such a
situation, students might feel pressure to endure a risky and uncomfortable procedure.
Nature special: Woo Suk Hwang revisited
Hwang denied the charge and the student recanted her statement. But in November 2005, amid
increasing evidence, Hwang admitted that he had lied (see Nature 438, 536–537; 2005). Two
students had donated eggs; Hwang even drove one to the clinic, where she donated her eggs
before returning to the lab to try to make cell-line clones of herself. Hwang had also paid donors
for eggs used in the 2004 paper, contradicting what the paper said. And he continued to
compensate donors even after a South Korean bioethics law came into effect in January 2005
banning the practice.
Hwang’s triumphs soon unravelled further. In January 2006, an SNU investigation committee
announced that both of his human-cloning papers were fraudulent. The committee found that the
cell line reported in 2004, called NT-1, was not produced by cloning and was probably a product
of parthenogenesis — the ‘virgin birth’ process by which an egg starts embryonic development
without the contribution of sperm. The 11 stem-cell lines claimed to be patient-specific clones in
the 2005 paper turned out to be normal embryonic-stem-cell lines from a fertility hospital that
had been relabelled. Images and graphs in both papers were fabricated to give the appearance of
clones. “The research team of Professor Hwang does not possess patient-specific stem cell lines
or any scientific bases for claiming having created one,” the report concluded.
Hwang’s empire crumbled. He was expelled from SNU in March 2006. The Seoul Prosecutor’s
Office raided his laboratory and launched a massive investigation.
Hwang took responsibility for poor oversight of his lab, but maintained that he had been duped
by a co-author. During the investigation, one co-author admitted to switching stem cells without
Hwang’s knowledge, but Hwang also admitted to ordering subordinates to fabricate data. A
complicated web of blame emerged in which Hwang admitted being involved in fraud but still
maintained that the achievement was real.
Data fabrication is not illegal in South Korea, but knowingly using bogus articles to get funding
is. The Prosecutor’s Office charged Hwang with fraud, embezzlement and bioethics violations,
and a three-year court case ensued. In 2009, the court threw out the fraud charge, saying that the
companies involved gave the money knowing that they would not benefit from the donation.
Hwang was, however, convicted of violating the country’s bioethics law and of embezzling
government funding. He was sentenced to two years in prison. The term, later reduced to 18
months, is still under appeal in court. But even if Hwang loses his appeal, as long as he doesn’t
break the law during his probation, he will not spend any time in jail, says Sean Hayes, a partner
at IPG Legal in Seoul.
Dogged pursuit
Despite his legal troubles — and the widespread belief that his career was over — Hwang
continued to work, thanks to the supporters who amassed US$3.5 million to launch Sooam.
About 15 scientists followed Hwang from SNU, and around half of those remain today among
Sooam’s 45 staff. His team now creates some 300 cow and pig embryos per day, and delivers
about 15 cloned puppies per month.
Related stories


Don’t rush to rehabilitate Hwang
Leaked files slam stem-cell therapy

Research ethics: 3 ways to blow the whistle
More related stories
Hwang has long been interested in cloning dogs. He reported3 the world’s first cloned puppy in
2005 — a claim upheld by the SNU investigation. Since 2006, Sooam has cloned more than 400
dogs, mostly pets. Customers, the majority of whom are from the United States, pay about
US$100,000 for the service. Sooam has begun supplying dogs to the Korean National Police
Agency in Seoul in the hope that clones of proven service animals will quickly learn their trade
as sniffer dogs. And last year, it launched a contest for a UK dog owner to have a dog cloned for
free — which would make it the first cloned canine in the country.
Although Sooam could make more money from cloning pets if it cut prices and increased
production, the non-profit organization wants to be more than a dog-cloning factory. “It’s just a
side project to get research funding for our other projects,” says Insung Hwang, a scientist at the
institute who agreed to speak about research at Sooam. He is no relation to Woo Suk.
Using cloning technology, Sooam is creating cows that produce the human interferon protein,
which can be used for treating a number of human diseases, in their milk4, and pigs that are
genetically tweaked so that their organs might be suitable for transplantation into humans5.
Sooam researchers have also created new models for diabetes by putting genes that cause
symptoms of the disease in mice into cloned pigs6 and dogs7. Likewise, says Insung Hwang, a
transgenic beagle at Sooam that carries a gene related to Alzheimer’s disease shows hallmarks of
the disease. Researchers at the institute have cloned this beagle 18 more times and are waiting to
see whether these dogs also develop the symptoms.
Sooam’s ambitions don’t stop there. In March 2012, the centre began a collaboration with the
Institute of Applied Ecology of the North, part of the North-Eastern Federal University in
Yakutsk, Russia. They have joined forces to try to clone a mammoth from ancient tissue dug
from permafrost. The project has received great fanfare, but Insung Hwang admits that it is a
long shot. “The chances are very small,” he says.
Sooam is also expanding its repertoire of species. It has already cloned coyotes (Canis
latrans)8using dog eggs and dog surrogates, and it now hopes to build on that work to clone the
African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), one of the most endangered carnivores in Africa.
Under Woo Suk Hwang’s guidance, the institute has published more than 40 papers documenting
cloning successes and technical improvements to the cloning process. “His group is making
important yet incremental progress towards long-term goals,” says Cindy Tian, a cloning and
reproductive biology researcher at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
“The episode drew attention and interest from government and ordinary people.”
The fact that Hwang is being published in peer-reviewed journals is a sign that he is becoming
accepted once more. Insung Hwang says that researchers he meets often bring up the fraud and
“some reviewers are a little hesitant” to take Sooam manuscripts seriously, but overall, they are
treated fairly. Tian, who edited two of Woo Suk Hwang’s papers forPLoS ONE, says that his
“designs are sound and the conclusions are supported with good data”. She adds that “it is very
unlikely a ‘come-back fraudster’ would do the same trick again”, and that because Sooam work
is likely to be closely scrutinized, the researchers there are bound to be on their best behaviour.
Woo Suk Hwang’s greatest coup in terms of regaining legitimacy was establishing a partnership
in March 2013 with BGI in Shenzhen, China — the world’s largest sequencing facility and a
powerhouse in scientific publishing (see Nature 464, 22–24; 2010). Together, they plan to look
at modifications of chromosomes that determine how genes are expressed, a field called
epigenetics. Analysing the variation between clones and how that may contribute to, for
example, different coat patterns in dogs could be a powerful tool for such work.
Yang Huanming, BGI’s co-founder, says that he was impressed by the level of involvement from
Woo Suk Hwang after watching him deliver a litter of cloned pups. “Personally, I like him, how
hard he works, and how passionate he is for science,” Yang says.
Woo Suk Hwang has also earned support from the Korean government. Roughly 50% of the
funding for Sooam now comes from government grants, which includes 3 billion won (US$2.8
million) over three years from Gyeonggi province, Seoul’s neighbour, for two cow-cloning
projects, according to Insung Hwang. In 2012 and 2013, the Rural Development Administration
contributed nearly 190 million won for the interferon project and 140 million won for transgenic
animal models of metabolic disease.
But some scientists remain wary. “If you fabricated data once, how would one know that you
will not do it again?” asks Hans Schöler, a stem-cell biologist at the Max Planck Institute for
Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany. Looking at the unlikely bid to clone a mammoth,
Jeong-Sun Seo, director of the Genomic Medicine Institute at SNU, feels a sense of déjà vu. “I
am afraid that it seems to be just show,” he says. Seo says that he is not opposed to Woo Suk
Hwang getting grants for animal cloning, but he draws the line at research into human cloning.
Hwang “doesn’t know the trends in stem cells. He should stick to his strong animal-cloning
technology,” Seo says.
Line of inquiry
Nevertheless, Woo Suk Hwang intends to return to human therapeutic cloning. But he may be
trying to ride a wave that has already passed. A competing technology — induced pluripotency,
discovered in 2006 — creates stem cells from adult cells, skirting the difficulty of sourcing
human eggs and the controversy of embryo destruction. Even the announcement9 last year that a
human stem-cell line had finally been created from a cloned embryo got a more muted reception
than the carnival that greeted Hwang when he announced his now-discredited paper.
In 2007, the Korean health ministry gave Sooam approval to do research using human embryos.
However, approval to start specific human therapeutic cloning projects has so far been denied
twice. Insung Hwang says that no explanation was given, but he thinks that ongoing efforts to
prove that the NT-1 cell line was in fact derived from an authentic clone could pave the way to
future approvals.
Woo Suk Hwang has made some progress in convincing official bodies of NT-1’s authenticity.
In 2012, a Seoul court ordered the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to register
the cell line — although this does not indicate its origins. The agency had initially refused on the
grounds that eggs used in the experiments had been obtained unethically because donors were
paid. But it was forced to relent because the eggs used to make NT-1 were obtained before the
bioethics law banning the practice came into effect.
In 2011, Canada issued a patent to Sooam that refers to NT-1 as a cloned cell line. And Insung
Hwang says that other patents are pending from some half a dozen of what he considers to be the
“most symbolic” countries.
“At some point, it was clear that the stakes were too high for Dr Hwang to fail.”
Getting recognition for NT-1 from the scientific community will be difficult, however. The paper
in which NT-1 was reported1was clearly fraudulent and has been retracted. And SNU’s finding
that the line was a product of parthenogenesis has been backed up by an analysis10 by George
Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. He looked at
thousands of DNA sites in the cell line and found that the chromosomes had recombination
patterns strikingly similar to those of mouse parthenotes — evidence that Daley calls
“unequivocal”.
But a 2011 study11 by Eui-Bae Jeung of Chungbuk National University in Cheongju, South
Korea, argues that NT-1 does come from a true clone. This analysis is based on the similarities
between the way the genes are methylated and expressed in the cell line and in cells from the
nuclear donor.
Mahendra Rao, director of the US Center for Regenerative Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland,
says that both analyses have their ambiguities. He says he believes that Daley’s data are stronger,
but that “more evaluation is required”.
The most convincing evidence against NT-1 being a real clone might be that from Woo Suk
Hwang’s own lab. In 2003, when the researchers were preparing the paper, several tests
indicated that NT-1 might be a parthenote, according to team leader Young-Joon Ryu. The Seoul
prosecutor’s report notes that another researcher, Sung Keun Kang, a former SNU professor and
a right-hand man to Hwang, went back and altered the test results.
Many stem-cell scientists see Woo Suk Hwang’s failure to publish NT-1 as a parthenote as a
missed opportunity12. “He could have made a career studying parthenogenetic activation,” says
Schöler.
Second chances
Among the public, opinions of Woo Suk Hwang are mixed. His actions have left many patients
feeling betrayed — although some continued to support him with fervour. Susan Fajt, who was
paralysed in a car accident and whom Hwang pledged to make walk again, continued to believe
him after the fraud was revealed. “I talked with him for four hours. He had tears in his eyes. I
don’t think he would mislead anybody,” she said in 2006. Fajt died in 2010.
But the scandal did not seem to have as disastrous an impact on support for stem-cell research
worldwide as had been feared. Some in South Korea even credit the episode as partly responsible
for a recent boom in stem-cell funding in the country (see Nature http://doi.org/qv5; 2012). “It
was helpful,” says Hyo-Soo Kim, a stem-cell scientist at SNU Hospital. “It drew attention and
interest from government and ordinary people.”
South Korea has now approved more stem-cell treatments than any other country. One such
therapy, which uses stem cells derived from umbilical cords to tackle osteoarthritis, was
approved in 2012 and is made by biotechnology firm Medipost in Seoul. Antonio Lee, chief
executive of the company’s US subsidiary, notes that immediately after the scandal the firm had
trouble enrolling patients, “but at the same time it raised awareness among the general
population about the potential of stem cells”.
Overall, the case did not lead to a major erosion of public trust, says Bernd Pulverer, head of
scientific publications at the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany,
although it did raise important questions about how the problems went undetected for so long.
“One clear issue that emerged was the danger of focusing such intense expectations to perform,
and to funnel so much funding to one individual,” he says. “At some point, it was clear that the
stakes were simply too high for Dr Hwang to fail.” For the research enterprise as a whole, he
adds, “I am not sure anything changed fundamentally”.
For Woo Suk Hwang, once at the centre of so much media attention, things have undoubtedly
changed. In Sooam’s chilly cafeteria he dines with a thick jacket on, chatting quietly to a handful
of staff. He will greet a journalist and shake hands, but he does not want to talk about what
happened. Hwang is increasingly surrounded by people who indulge him in that — offering a
space for his ambitions to expand without constant reminders of his failures. When lunch is
finished, he steals away, back to his ever-multiplying dogs and his hopes for redemption.

Additional reporting by Soo Bin Park.
Article 4: Center for Genetics and Society
Reproductive Cloning Arguments Pro and Con
Cloning is a form of asexual reproduction. A child produced by cloning would be the genetic duplicate of an
existing person. If you cloned yourself, the resulting child would be neither your son or daughter nor your
twin brother or sister, but a new category of human being: your clone.
The great majority of people have an intuitive sense that human beings should not be cloned. Arguments
offered for and against reproductive cloning are given below. A summary comment follows at the end of the
arguments.
Arguments Against Reproductive Cloning
1. Reproductive cloning would foster an understanding of children, and of people in general, as objects that
can be designed and manufactured to possess specific characteristics.
2. Reproductive cloning would diminish the sense of uniqueness of an individual. It would violate deeply and
widely held convictions concerning human individuality and freedom, and could lead to a devaluation of
clones in comparison with non-clones.
3. Cloned children would unavoidably be raised "in the shadow" of their nuclear donor, in a way that would
strongly tend to constrain individual psychological and social development.
4. Reproductive cloning is inherently unsafe. At least 95% of mammalian cloning experiments have resulted
in failures in the form of miscarriages, stillbirths, and life-threatening anomalies; some experts believe no
clones are fully healthy. The technique could not be developed in humans without putting the physical safety
of the clones and the women who bear them at grave risk.
5. If reproductive cloning is permitted to happen and becomes accepted, it is difficult to see how any other
dangerous applications of genetic engineering technology could be proscribed.
Rebuttals to Arguments Against Reproductive Cloning
1 and 2. This will be true only if we allow it to be true. There is no reason that individuals and society can't
learn to embrace human clones as just one more element of human diversity and creativity.
3. The problem of "expectations" is hardly unique to cloned children. Most parents learn to communicate
their expectations about their children in a moderate and ultimately positive way.
4. Every medical technology carries with it a degree of risk. Cloning techniques will eventually be perfected
in mammals and will then be suitable for human trials.
5. Human society can accept or reject any proposed technology on its own merits.
Arguments in Favor of Reproductive Cloning
1. Reproductive cloning can provide genetically related children for people who cannot be helped by other
fertility treatments (i.e., who do not produce eggs or sperm).
2. Reproductive cloning would allow lesbians to have a child without having to use donor sperm, and gay
men to have a child that does not have genes derived from an egg donor (though, of course, a surrogate
would have to carry the pregnancy).
3. Reproductive cloning could allow parents of a child who has died to seek redress for their loss.
4. Cloning is a reproductive right, and should be allowed once it is judged to be no less safe than natural
reproduction.
Rebuttals to Arguments in Favor of Reproductive Cloning
1. The number of men and women who do not produce eggs or sperm at all is very small, and has been
greatly reduced by modern assisted-reproduction techniques. If cloning could be perfected and used for this
limited group, it would be all but impossible to prevent its use from spreading. Further, this argument
appropriates the phrase "genetically related" to embrace a condition that has never before occurred in
human history, one which abolishes the genetic variations that have always existed between parent and
child.
2. Even if cloning were safe, it would be impossible to allow reproductive cloning for lesbians or gay men
without making it generally available to all. Policy and social changes that protect lesbian and gay families
are a much more pressing need.
3. Throughout history, parents who have lost children have grieved and sought consolation from family and
community. "Replacing" the deceased child by cloning degrades and dehumanizes the child, its replacement,
and all of us.
4. Rights are socially negotiated, and no "right" to clone oneself has ever been established. Furthermore,
there is an immense difference between a woman's desire to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and the
desire to create a genetic duplicate of another person. There is no inconsistency between supporting the
former and opposing the latter.
Summary Comment
Most advocates of human cloning also advocate the genetic modification of the human species. Human
cloning is a blunt form of eugenics-it "copies" an existing genome-while inheritable genetic modification
allows the creation of "designer babies" through manipulation of individual genes. But cloning technologies
are needed if inheritable genetic modification is to become commercially practicable. This is the deeper and
more far-reaching motivation behind much of the advocacy of human cloning.
The Center for Genetics and Society believes that when all the arguments are considered together the case
for allowing human cloning is not compelling, and that the harms of doing so are great.
Last modified May 15, 2006
Article 5:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/humancloning.htm
Article 6: Cloning
Fast Facts
CNN Library
Updated 9:41 AM ET, Fri July 31, 2015
Dolly the Sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, is shown in this undated photo.
Veterinarians gave Dolly a lethal injection February 14, 2003 at Scotland's Roslin
Institute after they discovered signs of progressive lung disease. (Photo by Getty
Images)
(CNN)Here's some background information about cloning, a process of creating an
identical copy of an original.
Facts:
Reproductive Cloning is the process of making a full living copy of an organism.
Reproductive cloning of animals transplants nuclei from body cells into eggs that have
had their nucleus removed. That egg is then stimulated to divide using an electrical
charge and is implanted into the uterus of a female.
Therapeutic Cloning is the process where nuclear transplantation of a patient's own
cells makes an oocyte from which immune-compatible cells (especially stem cells) can
be derived for transplant. These cells are stimulated to divide and are grown in a Petri
dish rather than in the uterus.
Timeline:
1952 - Scientists demonstrate they can remove the nucleus from a frog's egg, replace it
with the nucleus of an embryonic frog cell, and get the egg to develop into a tadpole.
1975 - Scientists get tadpoles after transferring cell nuclei from adult frogs.
1986 - Sheep cloned by nuclear transfer from embryonic cells.
February 22, 1997 - Scientists reveal Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned
from cells of an adult animal. She was actually born on July 5, 1996.
1998 - More than 50 mice are reported cloned from a single mouse over several
generations. Eightcalves are cloned from a cow.
2000 - Pigs and goats are reported cloned from adult cells.
2001 - Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Massachusetts, says it produced a sixcell clonedhuman embryo, in research aimed at harvesting stem cells.
2001 - Five bulls are cloned from a champion bull, Full Flush.
2002 - Rabbits and a kitten are reported cloned from adult cells.
December 27, 2002 - Clonaid claims to produce first human clone, a baby girl, Eve.
January 23, 2003 - Clonaid claims to have cloned the first baby boy. The baby was
allegedly cloned from tissue taken from the Japanese couple's comatose 2-year-old
boy, who was killed in an accident in 2001. Clonaid has never provided physical
evidence of the cloning.
February 14, 2003 - The Roslin Institute confirms that Dolly, the world's first cloned
mammal, was euthanized after being diagnosed with progressive lung disease. She
was 6 years old.
May 4, 2003 - The first mule is cloned at the University of Idaho, named Idaho Gem.
June 9, 2003 - Researchers Gordon Woods and Dirk Vanderwall from the University of
Idaho and Ken White from Utah State University claim to have cloned a second mule.
August 6, 2003 - Italian scientists at the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in
Cremona, Italy, say they have created the world's first cloned horse, Prometea, from an
adult cell taken from the horse who gave birth to her.
September 25, 2003 - French scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural
Research at Joy en Josas, France, become the first to clone rats.
February 12, 2004 - South Korean researchers report they have created human
embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells. Findings by a team of
researchers were presented to South Korean scientists and describe in detail the
process of how to create human embryos by cloning. The report says the scientists
used eggs donated by Korean women. An investigative panel concludes in 2006 that
South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang's human stem cell cloning research was faked.
August 3, 2005 - South Korean researchers announce they have successfully cloned
a dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.
December 8, 2008-April 4, 2009 - Five cloned puppies from Trakr, a German Shepherd
Sept.11 Ground Zero rescue dog, are born.
May 2009 - Clone of Tailor Fit, a two-time quarter horse world champion, is born, one
of several cloned horses born that year.
September 29, 2011 - At South Korea's Incheon Airport, seven "super clone" snifferdogs are dispatched to detect contraband luggage. They are all golden Labrador
Retrievers that are genetically identical to "Chase", who was the top drug detention
canine until he retired in 2007.
May 15, 2013 - Oregon Health & Science University researchers report in the journal
Cell that they have created embryonic stem cells through cloning. Shoukhrat Mitalipov
and the biologists produced human embryos using skin cells, and then used the
embryos to produce stem cell lines.
April 2014 - For the first time, cloning technologies have been used to generate stem
cells that are genetically matched to adult patients. Researchers put the nucleus of an
adult skin cell inside an egg, and that reconstructed egg went through the initial stages
of embryonic development, according to research published this month.
ARTICLE 7:
THE NEW AGE OF
EXPLORATION
Published: April 2013
Bringing Them Back to Life
The revival of an extinct species is no longer a
fantasy.
But is it a good idea?
By Carl Zimmer
Photograph by Robb Kendrick
On July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French
scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only to watch
it become extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as abucardo, or
Pyrenean ibex. The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a large, handsome creature, reaching
up to 220 pounds and sporting long, gently curved horns. For thousands of years it lived high in the
Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides France from Spain, where it clambered along cliffs,
nibbling on leaves and stems and enduring harsh winters.
Then came the guns. Hunters drove down the bucardo population over several centuries. In 1989
Spanish scientists did a survey and concluded that there were only a dozen or so individuals left. Ten
years later a single bucardo remained: a female nicknamed Celia. A team from the Ordesa and Monte
Perdido National Park, led by wildlife veterinarian Alberto Fernández-Arias, caught the animal in a
trap, clipped a radio collar around her neck, and released her back into the wild. Nine months later
the radio collar let out a long, steady beep: the signal that Celia had died. They found her crushed
beneath a fallen tree. With her death, the bucardo became officially extinct.
But Celia’s cells lived on, preserved in labs in Zaragoza and Madrid. Over the next few years a team of
reproductive physiologists led by José Folch injected nuclei from those cells into goat eggs emptied
of their own DNA, then implanted the eggs in surrogate mothers. After 57 implantations, only seven
animals had become pregnant. And of those seven pregnancies, six ended in miscarriages. But one
mother—a hybrid between a Spanish ibex and a goat—carried a clone of Celia to term. Folch and his
colleagues performed a cesarean section and delivered the 4.5-pound clone. As Fernández-Arias held
the newborn bucardo in his arms, he could see that she was struggling to take in air, her tongue
jutting grotesquely out of her mouth. Despite the efforts to help her breathe, after a mere ten minutes
Celia’s clone died. A necropsy later revealed that one of her lungs had grown a gigantic extra lobe as
solid as a piece of liver. There was nothing anyone could have done.
The dodo and the great auk, the thylacine and the Chinese river dolphin, the passenger pigeon and
the imperial woodpecker—the bucardo is only one in the long list of animals humans have driven
extinct, sometimes deliberately. And with many more species now endangered, the bucardo will have
much more company in the years to come. Fernández-Arias belongs to a small but passionate group
of researchers who believe that cloning can help reverse that trend.
The notion of bringing vanished species back to life—some call it de-extinction—has hovered at the
boundary between reality and science fiction for more than two decades, ever since novelist Michael
Crichton unleashed the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park on the world. For most of that time the science of
de-extinction has lagged far behind the fantasy. Celia’s clone is the closest that anyone has gotten to
true de-extinction. Since witnessing those fleeting minutes of the clone’s life, Fernández-Arias, now
the head of the government of Aragon’s Hunting, Fishing and Wetlands department, has been
waiting for the moment when science would finally catch up, and humans might gain the ability to
bring back an animal they had driven extinct.
“We are at that moment,” he told me.
I met Fernández-Arias last autumn at a closed-session scientific meeting at the National Geographic
Society’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. For the first time in history a group of geneticists,
wildlife biologists, conservationists, and ethicists had gathered to discuss the possibility of deextinction. Could it be done? Should it be done? One by one, they stood up to present remarkable
advances in manipulating stem cells, in recovering ancient DNA, in reconstructing lost genomes. As
the meeting unfolded, the scientists became increasingly excited. A consensus was emerging: Deextinction is now within reach.
“It’s gone very much further, very much more rapidly than anyone ever would’ve imagined,” says
Ross MacPhee, a curator of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
“What we really need to think about is why we would want to do this in the first place, to actually
bring back a species.”
In Jurassic Park dinosaurs are resurrected for their entertainment value. The disastrous
consequences that follow have cast a shadow over the notion of de-extinction, at least in the popular
imagination. But people tend to forget that Jurassic Park was pure fantasy. In reality the only species
we can hope to revive now are those that died within the past few tens of thousands of years and left
behind remains that harbor intact cells or, at the very least, enough ancient DNA to reconstruct the
creature’s genome. Because of the natural rates of decay, we can never hope to retrieve the full
genome of Tyrannosaurus rex, which vanished about 65 million years ago. The species theoretically
capable of being revived all disappeared while humanity was rapidly climbing toward world
domination. And especially in recent years we humans were the ones who wiped them out, by
hunting them, destroying their habitats, or spreading diseases. This suggests another reason for
bringing them back.
“If we’re talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this,”
says Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-
extinction for years. Some people protest that reviving a species that no longer exists amounts to
playing God. Archer scoffs at the notion. “I think we played God when we exterminated these
animals.”
Other scientists who favor de-extinction argue that there will be concrete benefits. Biological
diversity is a storehouse of natural invention. Most pharmaceutical drugs, for example, were not
invented from scratch—they were derived from natural compounds found in wild plant species,
which are also vulnerable to extinction. Some extinct animals also performed vital services in their
ecosystems, which might benefit from their return. Siberia, for example, was home 12,000 years ago
to mammoths and other big grazing mammals. Back then, the landscape was not moss-dominated
tundra but grassy steppes. Sergey Zimov, a Russian ecologist and director of the Northeast Science
Station in Cherskiy in the Republic of Sakha, has long argued that this was no coincidence: The
mammoths and numerous herbivores maintained the grassland by breaking up the soil and
fertilizing it with their manure. Once they were gone, moss took over and transformed the grassland
into less productive tundra.
In recent years Zimov has tried to turn back time on the tundra by bringing horses, muskoxen, and
other big mammals to a region of Siberia he calls Pleistocene Park. And he would be happy to have
woolly mammoths roam free there. “But only my grandchildren will see them,” he says. “A mouse
breeds very fast. Mammoths breed very slow. Be prepared to wait.”
When Fernández-Arias first tried to bring back the bucardo ten years ago, the tools at his
disposal were, in hindsight, woefully crude. It had been only seven years since the birth of Dolly the
sheep, the first cloned mammal. In those early days scientists would clone an animal by taking one of
its cells and inserting its DNA into an egg that had been emptied of its own genetic material. An
electric shock was enough to get the egg to start dividing, after which the scientists would place the
developing embryo in a surrogate mother. The vast majority of those pregnancies failed, and the few
animals that were born were often beset with health problems.
Over the past decade scientists have improved their success with cloning animals, shifting the
technology from high-risk science to workaday business. Researchers have also developed the ability
to induce adult animal cells to return to an embryo-like state. These can be coaxed to develop into
any type of cell—including eggs or sperm. The eggs can then be further manipulated to develop into
full-fledged embryos.
Such technical sleights of hand make it far easier to conjure a vanished species back to life. Scientists
and explorers have been talking for decades about bringing back the mammoth. Their first—and so
far only—achievement was to find well-preserved mammoths in the Siberian tundra. Now, armed
with the new cloning technologies, researchers at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul
have teamed up with mammoth experts from North-Eastern Federal University in the Siberian city
of Yakutsk. Last summer they traveled up the Yana River, drilling tunnels into the frozen cliffs along
the river with giant hoses. In one of those tunnels they found chunks of mammoth tissue, including
bone marrow, hair, skin, and fat. The tissue is now in Seoul, where the Sooam scientists are
examining it.
“If we dream about it, the ideal case would be finding a viable cell, a cell that’s alive,” says Sooam’s
Insung Hwang, who organized the Yana River expedition. If the Sooam researchers do find such a
cell, they could coax it to produce millions of cells. These could be reprogrammed to grow into
embryos, which could then be implanted in surrogate elephants, the mammoth’s closest living
relatives.
Most scientists doubt that any living cell could have survived freezing on the open tundra. But
Hwang and his colleagues have a Plan B: capture an intact nucleus of a mammoth cell, which is far
more likely to have been preserved than the cell itself. Cloning a mammoth from nothing but an
intact nucleus, however, will be a lot trickier. The Sooam researchers will need to transfer the
nucleus into an elephant egg that has had its own nucleus removed. This will require harvesting eggs
from an elephant—a feat no one has yet accomplished. If the DNA inside the nucleus is well
preserved enough to take control of the egg, it just might start dividing into a mammoth embryo. If
the scientists can get past that hurdle, they still have the formidable task of transplanting the embryo
into an elephant’s womb. Then, as Zimov cautions, they will need patience. If all goes well, it will still
be almost two years before they can see if the elephant will give birth to a healthy mammoth.
“The thing that I always say is, if you don’t try, how would you know that it’s impossible?” says
Hwang.
In 1813, while traveling along the Ohio River from Hardensburgh to Louisville, John James
Audubon witnessed one of the most miraculous natural phenomena of his time: a flock of passenger
pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) blanketing the sky. “The air was literally filled with Pigeons,” he
later wrote. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike
melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.”
When Audubon reached Louisville before sunset, the pigeons were still passing overhead—and
continued to do so for the next three days. “The people were all in arms,” wrote Audubon. “The banks
of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the pilgrims... Multitudes were
thus destroyed.”
In 1813 it would have been hard to imagine a species less likely to become extinct. Yet by the end of
the century the red-breasted passenger pigeon was in catastrophic decline, the forests it depended
upon shrinking, and its numbers dwindling from relentless hunting. In 1900 the last confirmed wild
bird was shot by a boy with a BB gun. Fourteen years later, just a century and a year after Audubon
marveled at their abundance, the one remaining captive passenger pigeon, a female named Martha,
died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
The writer and environmentalist Stewart Brand, best known for founding the Whole Earth
Catalog in the late 1960s, grew up in Illinois hiking in forests that just a few decades before had been
aroar with the sound of the passenger pigeons’ wings. “Its habitat was my habitat,” he says. Two
years ago Brand and his wife, Ryan Phelan, founder of the genetic-testing company DNA Direct,
began to wonder if it might be possible to bring the species back to life. One night over dinner with
Harvard biologist George Church, a master at manipulating DNA, they discovered that he was
thinking along the same lines.
Church knew that standard cloning methods wouldn’t work, since bird embryos develop inside shells
and no museum specimen of the passenger pigeon (including Martha herself, now in the
Smithsonian) would likely contain a fully intact, functional genome. But he could envision a different
way of re-creating the bird. Preserved specimens contain fragments of DNA. By piecing together the
fragments, scientists can now read the roughly one billion letters in the passenger pigeon genome.
Church can’t yet synthesize an entire animal genome from scratch, but he has invented technology
that allows him to make sizable chunks of DNA of any sequence he wants. He could theoretically
manufacture genes for passenger pigeon traits—a gene for its long tail, for example—and splice them
into the genome of a stem cell from a common rock pigeon.
Rock pigeon stem cells containing this doctored genome could be transformed into germ cells, the
precursors to eggs and sperm. These could then be injected into rock pigeon eggs, where they would
migrate to the developing embryos’ sex organs. Squabs hatched from these eggs would look like
normal rock pigeons—but they would be carrying eggs and sperm loaded with doctored DNA. When
the squabs reached maturity and mated, their eggs would hatch squabs carrying unique passenger
pigeon traits. These birds could then be further interbred, the scientists selecting for birds that were
more and more like the vanished species.
Church’s genome-retooling method could theoretically work on any species with a close living
relative and a genome capable of being reconstructed. So even if the Sooam team fails to find an
intact mammoth nucleus, someone might still bring the species back. Scientists already have the
technology for reconstructing most of the genes it takes to make a mammoth, which could be
inserted into an elephant stem cell. And there is no shortage of raw material for further experiments
emerging from the Siberian permafrost. “With mammoths, it’s really a dime a dozen up there,” says
Hendrik Poinar, an expert on mammoth DNA at McMaster University in Ontario. “It’s just a matter
of finances now.”
Though the revival of a mammoth or a passenger pigeon is no longer mere fantasy, the reality is
still years away. For another extinct species, the time frame may be much shorter. Indeed, there’s at
least a chance it may be back among the living before this story is published.
The animal in question is the obsession of a group of Australian scientists led by Michael Archer,
who call their endeavor the Lazarus Project. Archer previously directed a highly publicized attempt
to clone the thylacine, an iconic marsupial carnivore that went extinct in the 1930s. That effort
managed to capture only some fragments of the thylacine’s DNA. Wary of the feverish expectations
that such high-profile experiments attract, Archer and his Lazarus Project collaborators kept quiet
about their efforts until they had some preliminary results to offer.
That time has come. Early in January, Archer and his colleagues revealed that they were trying to
revive two closely related species of Australian frog. Until their disappearance in the mid-1980s, the
species shared a unique—and utterly astonishing—method of reproduction. The female frogs
released a cloud of eggs, which the males fertilized, whereupon the females swallowed the eggs
whole. A hormone in the eggs triggered the female to stop making stomach acid; her stomach, in
effect, became a womb. A few weeks later the female opened her mouth and regurgitated her fully
formed babies. This miraculous reproductive feat gave the frogs their common names: the
northern (Rheobatrachus vitellinus) and southern (Rheobatrachus silus)gastric brooding frogs.
Unfortunately, not long after researchers began to study the species, they vanished. “The frogs were
there one minute, and when scientists came back, they were gone,” says Andrew French, a cloning
expert at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Lazarus Project.
To bring the frogs back, the project scientists are using state-of-the-art cloning methods to introduce
gastric brooding frog nuclei into eggs of living Australian marsh frogs and barred frogs that have had
their own genetic material removed. It’s slow going, because frog eggs begin to lose their potency
after just a few hours and cannot be frozen and revived. The scientists need fresh eggs, which the
frogs produce only once a year, during their short breeding season.
Nevertheless, they’ve made progress. “Suffice it to say, we actually have embryos now of this extinct
animal,” says Archer. “We’re pretty far down this track.” The Lazarus Project scientists are confident
that they just need to get more high-quality eggs to keep moving forward. “At this point it’s just a
numbers game,” says French.
The matchless oddity of the gastric brooding frogs’ reproduction drives home what we lose when
a species becomes extinct. But does that mean we should bring them back? Would the world be that
much richer for having female frogs that grow little frogs in their stomachs? There are tangible
benefits, French argues, such as the insights the frogs might be able to provide about reproduction—
insights that might someday lead to treatments for pregnant women who have trouble carrying
babies to term. But for many scientists, de-extinction is a distraction from the pressing work
required to stave off mass extinctions.
“There is clearly a terrible urgency to saving threatened species and habitats,” says John Wiens, an
evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “As far as I can see, there is little
urgency for bringing back extinct ones. Why invest millions of dollars in bringing a handful of species
back from the dead, when there are millions still waiting to be discovered, described, and protected?”
De-extinction advocates counter that the cloning and genomic engineering technologies being
developed for de-extinction could also help preserve endangered species, especially ones that don’t
breed easily in captivity. And though cutting-edge biotechnology can be expensive when it’s first
developed, it has a way of becoming very cheap very fast. “Maybe some people thought polio vaccines
were a distraction from iron lungs,” says George Church. “It’s hard in advance to say what’s
distraction and what’s salvation.”
But what would we be willing to call salvation? Even if Church and his colleagues manage to retrofit
every passenger pigeon–specific trait into a rock pigeon, would the resulting creature truly be a
passenger pigeon or just an engineered curiosity? If Archer and French do produce a single gastric
brooding frog—if they haven’t already—does that mean they’ve revived the species? If that frog
doesn’t have a mate, then it becomes an amphibian version of Celia, and its species is as good as
extinct. Would it be enough to keep a population of the frogs in a lab or perhaps in a zoo, where
people could gawk at it? Or would it need to be introduced back into the wild to be truly de-extinct?
“The history of putting species back after they’ve gone extinct in the wild is fraught with difficulty,”
says conservation biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. A huge effort went into restoring the
Arabian oryx to the wild, for example. But after the animals were returned to a refuge in central
Oman in 1982, almost all were wiped out by poachers. “We had the animals, and we put them back,
and the world wasn’t ready,” says Pimm. “Having the species solves only a tiny, tiny part of the
problem.”
Hunting is not the only threat that would face recovered species. For many, there’s no place left to
call home. The Chinese river dolphin became extinct due to pollution and other pressures from the
human population on the Yangtze River. Things are just as bad there today. Around the world frogs
are getting decimated by a human-spread pathogen called the chytrid fungus. If Australian biologists
someday release gastric brooding frogs into their old mountain streams, they could promptly become
extinct again.
“Without an environment to put re-created species back into, the whole exercise is futile and a gross
waste of money,” says Glenn Albrecht, director of the Institute for Social Sustainability at Murdoch
University in Australia.
Even if de-extinction proved a complete logistical success, the questions would not end. Passenger
pigeons might find the rebounding forests of the eastern United States a welcoming home. But
wouldn’t that be, in effect, the introduction of a genetically engineered organism into the
environment? Could passenger pigeons become a reservoir for a virus that might wipe out another
bird species? And how would the residents of Chicago, New York, or Washington, D.C., feel about a
new pigeon species arriving in their cities, darkening their skies, and covering their streets with
snowstorms of dung?
De-extinction advocates are pondering these questions, and most believe they need to be resolved
before any major project moves forward. Hank Greely, a leading bioethicist at Stanford University,
has taken a keen interest in investigating the ethical and legal implications of de-extinction. And yet
for Greely, as for many others, the very fact that science has advanced to the point that such a
spectacular feat is possible is a compelling reason to embrace de-extinction, not to shun it.
“What intrigues me is just that it’s really cool,” Greely says. “A saber-toothed cat? It would be neat to
see one of those.”
Carl Zimmer’s award-winning blog, the Loom, is hosted by National Geographic. Robb Kendrick also used 19th-century
tintype photography in a story on 21st-century cowboys in the December 2007 issue.