Have you ever wished you could have a clone of yourself to do homework while you hit the skate park or went out with your friends?Imagine if you could really do that. Where would you start?What exactly is cloning?Cloning is the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another. This means that every single bit of DNA is the same between the two!You might not believe it, but there are human clones among us right now. They weren't made in a lab, though: they're identical twins, created naturally. Below, we'll see how natural identical twins relate to modern cloning technologies.How is cloning done?You may have first heard of cloning when Dolly the Sheep showed up on the scene in 1997. Cloning technologies have been around for much longer than Dolly, though.How does one go about making an exact genetic copy of an organism? There are a couple of ways to do this: artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer. How do these processes differ?1. Artificial Embryo TwinningArtificial embryo twinning is the relatively low-tech version of cloning. As the name suggests, this technology mimics the natural process of creating identical twins.Open large version
In nature, twins occur just after fertilization of an egg cell by a sperm cell. In rare cases, when the resulting fertilized egg, called a zygote, tries to divide into a two-celled embryo, the two cells separate. Each cell continues dividing on its own, ultimately developing into a separate individual within the mother. Since the two cells came from the same zygote, the resulting individuals are genetically identical.Artificial embryo twinning uses the same approach, but it occurs in a Petri dish instead of in the mother's body. This is accomplished by manually separating a very early embryo into individual cells, and then allowing each cell to divide and develop on its own. The resulting embryos are placed into a surrogate mother, where they are carried to term and delivered. Again, since all the embryos came from the same zygote, they are genetically identical.2. Somatic Cell Nuclear TransferSomatic cell nuclear transfer, (SCNT) uses a different approach than artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result: an exact clone, or genetic copy, 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 the two types of reproductive cells, sperm and egg. Sperm and egg are also called germ cells. In mammals, every somatic cell has two complete sets of chromosomes, whereas the germ cells only have one complete set.Nuclear: The nucleus is like the cell's brain. It's an enclosed compartment that contains all the information that cells need to form an organism. This information comes in the form of DNA. It's the 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 transferred the nucleus from that cell to an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. After a couple of chemical tweaks, the egg cell, with its new nucleus, was behaving just like a freshly fertilized zygote. It developed into an embryo, which was implanted into a surrogate mother and carried to term.The lamb, Dolly, was an exact genetic replica of the adult female sheep that donated the somatic cell nucleus to the egg. She was the first-ever mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.How does SCNT differ from the natural way of making an embryo?Open large version
The fertilization of an egg by a sperm and the SCNT cloning method both result in the same thing: a dividing ball of cells, called an embryo. So what exactly is the difference between these methods?An embryo is composed of cells that contain two complete sets of chromosomes. The difference between fertilization and SCNT lies in where those two sets originated.In fertilization, the sperm and egg both contain one set of chromosomes. When the sperm and egg join, the resulting zygote ends up with two sets - one from the father (sperm) and one from the mother (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. Therefore, in the resulting embryo, both sets of chromosomes come from the somatic cell. |
Agape Christian Academy
Elisa Cruz
10b
Mrs. Valencia
Psychology Class
January 8, 2013
Modern Child Prodigies
Go back 250 years ago to Vienna, Austria. You’re out on the town looking for some entertainment when you come across an advertisement for a masterful piano player, performing a recital that night. You’re probably expecting to see a man with graying hair and a hunched back from all the years of leaning over the piano. Instead, you see a boy barely old enough for schooling, playing with all the skill of any player you’ve ever seen. If you haven’t guessed by now, you’re watching Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: the classic example of a child prodigy.
Fast forward to now. When was the last time we had a child prodigy as notable as Mozart? The general consensus seems to be almost never. We’ve all heard of “that one kid who’s 12 and in college” but we’ve never met him and he’s got no effect on our lives. That should be how we truly measure a prodigy, by the impact they make in the world.
Sure, they may be making mathematicians and physicists out of themselves working toward a better future for all of us, but we never physically experience their contributions. On the other hand, these people are still brilliant and their talent can’t be denied or undermined. That’s why I cringe when I see the latest story about a child prodigy that can get the high score in Dance Dance Revolution or knocking all the billiard balls at once into the pockets he said they were going to go in. Sure it’s a neat trick, but they can hardly be considered a prodigy.
