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Molecular Genetics: Animal Cloning 352 Views
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Description:
In this video from our course on molecular genetics, learn all about animal cloning.
Transcript
- 00:00
[ whoosh ]
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:03
[ whoosh ]
- 00:07
Molecular Genetics
- 00:08
Cloning Animals
Full Transcript
- 00:10
A la Shmoop
- 00:12
We're talking biology with Dr. Ruth Tennen
- 00:15
and we're gonna talk now about biotechnology.
- 00:19
Okay, so, walk us through how scientists clone animals.
- 00:24
'Cause it just sounds so cool.
- 00:25
Yes, it does sound cool.
- 00:27
So, it's the Dolly idea, basically.
- 00:29
- We've all heard about the sheep. - The sheep.
- 00:30
Yep. And the basic process is called nuclear transplantation.
- 00:35
This is how most scientists would do it.
- 00:37
So you start off with an egg.
- 00:39
And you empty out the DNA from that egg.
- 00:41
So you end up with what's called an enucleated egg,
- 00:43
because there's no nucleus.
- 00:45
And then you take a differentiated cell,
- 00:47
which basically means, you know, it's a skin cell,
- 00:49
or a heart cell. It's become something; it's a mature cell.
- 00:51
You take the DNA from that differentiated cell,
- 00:53
and you insert it into that empty egg.
- 00:56
So, basically, you have turned that egg into,
- 00:58
essentially, a fertilized egg.
- 01:01
You basically take that egg,
- 01:02
you would allow it to develop into an embryo
- 01:04
in a petri dish, and then you'd put it into a surrogate mom -
- 01:06
so like a surrogate sheep mom -
- 01:08
allow it to develop,
- 01:09
and then you'd be born with basically a genetically identical
- 01:11
version of whatever organism you started with.
- 01:14
[ sheep baaing ]
- 01:16
So why can't we do that with humans?
- 01:20
So, there are definitely technical hurdles.
- 01:23
I think the bigger hurdles are, like, moral and ethical things.
- 01:26
It's possible people are working on that stuff,
- 01:27
but there are, like, major international laws
- 01:29
to prevent such things from happening right now.
- 01:32
And I think that there's also always issues with, like,
- 01:34
who's gonna have access to the technology.
- 01:36
And it's really only gonna be part of the population.
- 01:38
And then does that cause inequalities and things like that?
- 01:40
So there's a lot of ethical issues.
- 01:41
All right, so, back into the real world.
- 01:43
You know, obviously, there are good reasons
- 01:46
to clone animals.
- 01:48
And it's almost cloning and breeding.
- 01:50
- It's, I guess, a combined partnership. - Mm-hmm. Yep.
- 01:53
How does that work? Like, give us some examples
- 01:55
for what the state of the art is for cloning animals
- 01:58
and breeding and, kind of, creating them.
- 01:59
Yeah, so, there's a few reasons
- 02:01
that people are cloning animals now.
- 02:02
So, one is -- So, when we make animal models of disease -
- 02:05
so let's say we want a mouse model of some human disease -
- 02:08
it can take a long time to do that by breeding.
- 02:10
Because you have to introduce multiple mutations
- 02:12
and you have to cross all the mice and everything.
- 02:14
If you could -- If you had a mouse and you could just
- 02:16
make a new version of that same mouse
- 02:17
without having to do all that breeding,
- 02:18
that would be a huge time saver. So that's one thing.
- 02:20
Definitely, if you had, you know, some sort of
- 02:23
livestock that had a particular trait that you were interested in,
- 02:25
- it's easier, probably, to clone than to breed that. - Sure.
- 02:27
People are actually -- There's a big market for
- 02:30
bringing back extinct animals
- 02:33
- Yeah, Re-Animator. Yeah. - Or deceased pets, also.
- 02:36
- That was a great film. - Yep, so...
- 02:37
- But go back to the mice thing. - Yep.
- 02:41
What ethical issues arise when using animals for scientific experiments?
- 02:47
I think right now, we don't have a whole lot of other alternatives.
- 02:49
So it's either test this stuff on humans,
- 02:51
and test a drug on humans without testing it on animals.
- 02:53
Or you have to sacrifice some mice.
- 02:55
And there are tons of regulations about how the mice are treated.
- 02:58
You have to submit a protocol to make sure that
- 02:59
you're humanely treating the animals.
- 03:00
But there's like, you know, all the time there are people
- 03:03
picketing outside of research universities saying,
- 03:06
we shouldn't be doing these experiments on mice, so...
- 03:07
- Yeah. - Some are problematic still. Yep.
- 03:09
Hmm. Okay. Yeah, interesting ethical issues.
- 03:13
[ whoop ]
- 03:14
How do scientists clone animals?
- 03:18
Why don't we clone humans?
- 03:20
What are examples of cloning animals?
- 03:24
What ethical issues arise when using animals for scientific experiments?
- 03:33
[ eww ]
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