Maridon
ANTH 1020-001
6/19/2014
CREATED IN A LAB
There is a conversation right now that heatedly debates the human role in the science
of genetic manufacturing. Some argue that science has no right to try to manipulate or
create life in a laboratory. Others argue that in order to understand ourselves, our future
and put together the puzzle of our past, the science of genetic engineering and genetic
manipulation is necessary. I entered this conversation long ago and have argued against
the former, the latter, and many views in between.
On the 5th July in 1996, a handful of Scottish scientists would take this conversation
to a whole new level. We had a revelation and her name was Dolly. The most famous ewe
in the world, because she was a clone. The very rst of her kind. The cell that became
Dolly was a somatic mammary gland cell taken from a Finn-Dorset ewe. Through a
complicated process the DNA to be cloned was inserted into an enucleated cell and given
electrical pulses to begin the cell division process independently. The cell divided and
divided again and Dolly came into being. Scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell
proved that a single cell, taken from a single region in one animal, could be used to
produce a whole individual identical to the rst. Dolly was not only the rst sheep to be
cloned, she was the rst mammal ever to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. Dolly
lived to be six years old and died of a lung disease common among sheep which are kept
indoors as often as she was. The scientists who created Dolly are certain that the
condition which caused her to be put down had very little to no connection with her being
a clone.
We learned a lot from Dolly. She taught us that we're just scratching the surface of
what's possible. I wish she and her genetic donor could have talked. I wish they could
have intelligently told us what it was like being them. How they felt about it, and about
each other. I think that just like Siamese twins, two organisms, no matter how similar are
still two distinct organisms. Genes can express themselves di"erently and both memory
and experience would have made them two very distinct individuals as well. Dolly was no
less a sheep to me than her surrogate mothers, and incredibly enough, Dolly was a
mother also. Her lineage still roams the Scottish highlands.
My current argument on the ever approaching human mastery of genetic engineering
is not based on what we should do if we could do it. Instead I hope that whatever
happens we ensure the ethical and moral treatment of living, sentient beings that deserve
all the humanitarian and animalistic ideals we strive to uphold for ourselves and fellow life
on the planet. All life is precious and unique. All life is necessary to the survival of other
life forms and the environmental habitats we all live in. Just because a life form is
produced in a lab does not mean its life does not have value. Call it a soul or a spark, I
believe Dolly the sheep had one. And quite literally, her life did begin with a spark.
So what about the future of genetics in our everyday lives? Designer babies, curing
disease, replacing limbs, cloning and evolution? What happens when there are no
humans because we have become something entirely di"erent? This is a subject I could
go on forever about. I'll leave it where it is and hope that one day it all works itself out like
nature has a way of doing so creatively.
Works Cited:
Shiels PG, Kind AJ, Campbell KH, et al (1999). "Analysis of telomere length in Dolly, a sheep
derived by nuclear transfer". Cloning 1 (2): 119
Wilmut I, Schnieke AE, McWhir J, Kind AJ, Campbell KH (1997). "Viable offspring derived from
fetal and adult mammalian cells". Nature 385 (6619): 8103.
Trounson AO (2006). "Future and applications of cloning". Methods Mol. Biol. Methods in Molecular
Biology 348: 31932.
