Cloning

             Throughout time, Hollywood has cashed in on the subject of cloning. Such films as Jurassic Park, Blade Runner, and A Brave New World are just a few of the mass amount of motion pictures  dealing with the duplication of living things. But is cloning a process that can be obtained through science fiction? Though many have seen the results of cloning through the magical ways of the cinema, one may not believe that this process of manifold has been around since the early 1900’s.

The year was 1902 and the great father of cloning, Hans Spemann, divided a salamander embryo into halves. Though the people of the twenty-first century may have the idea that to split the embryo of the salamander, Mr. Spemann would use high tech medical instruments; these people would be shocked to find that he used a strand of hair, which he tightened a loop around embryos , until he separated the nucleus and some of the cytoplasm. Upon division, Spemann found that early embryo cells contain all the genetic information necessary to create a new organism.  This “Eureka” moment in history really changed the idea of cloning for the better. Mr. Spemann had set metaphorical cloning bar quite high and for awhile it seemed that this discovery was to be buried into the vortex of unimportance, until ... that day.  

That fine day was February 22, 1997. A team from the Roslin Institute which was lead by Dr. Ian Wilmut changed the face of history forever by revealing what looked like an average sheep. That sheep was what was going to be one of the most famous if not the most famous sheep in modern day. Dolly was this seven month old Trojan lamb's name and Dolly was the first ever clone of a mammal. She was an exact biological carbon copy, a laboratory counterfeit of her mother. In essence, Dolly was her mother's biological twin. This amazed the world in that fiction had become reality; and had shown the importance of the biology.  Even though the Roslin Institute didn’t come out and say it, I believe that they are in gratitude to Mr. Spemann due to the fact that without his discovery, there project would never exist. Animal cloning is also news today for that the government has stated that cloned animals produce safe meat. Despite the “A Okay” from the leaders of our country, the public are still shaky on the idea of eating meat from an animal which was born via a test tube.

For the last few decades, cloning was a fictitious idea that lay deep within the plot twists of many sci-fi films. The very idea that cloning could one day become reality was thought to be a scientific impossibility by many experts but on one exhilarating day, what was thought to be "purely fiction" became reality. Though the United States always wants to be the most technologically advanced, we should proceed with caution for that through these cinema classics it seems that with the addition of cloning, chaos always follows.