 Hi, my name is Anne Sanders and today we'll be talking about cloning of organisms. So cloning simply means to make an exact copy. It's kind of like making a Xerox copy of something else. So for cloning it's an organism that is genetically identical to another. That's our goal. So people use cloning very often in agriculture, you may not realize this. So if you take a cutting of a plant, so cut the mama plant and then grow it separately, you can do this for roses, butterfly bushes, even tomato plants, you are cloning that plant. You are creating an exact, identical genetic copy to the mother plant. Now another way that you could do this is you could take the roots and you can dice them up with a knife and you can end up with a single cell from that root and if you put it in the right growth media you can then grow the entire organism from that one single cell. So that's a little bit what a more traditional way of thinking about cloning. Now again the take away from this is either process, each new plant is absolutely genetically identical to the old ones. Now for animals cloning is a lot more challenging. Now if I cut off my finger I would not be able to grow a genetically identical person to myself. If I cut off my arm still wouldn't happen. I wouldn't be able to grow it from a cutting of myself. So the way that we are able to do cloning in animals is that we are able to do nuclear transplantation. So simply put this is where you isolate the nucleus of a somatic cell. So this is a regular cell in your body, maybe a skin cell, maybe a heart cell, maybe a liver cell. So any of those cells that have all of our 46 chromosomes for humans, alright. Then you remove that nucleus. Now separately in a different petri dish you remove the nucleus of an egg cell. So an egg cell is something that we use for normal reproduction. But again we are going to take away that DNA, we are going to take away that nucleus. And then we simply combine the nucleus of that somatic cell with the empty egg that doesn't have a nucleus. Put those guys together. That is nuclear transplantation to create a clone of that original somatic cell. Let me show you what I mean by that with pictures in just a second. So there are two kinds of cloning that people can do. They can do reproductive cloning or they can do therapeutic cloning. Now the goal of reproductive cloning is simply to create a baby, to create a complete organism. But therapeutic cloning is quite different. So the goal of that is to create cells or tissues for the treatment of disease. Alright, so with reproductive cloning we start with an adult cell, maybe a skin cell, liver cell, whatever. And then we are going to isolate just the nucleus. And so you can see that here in blue. Down here we are going to take an egg cell and we are going to remove, we are going to take away that particular nucleus. And then we are going to combine the nucleus from the adult cell and the body of the egg cell together. So now we have got a single cell but it has got the DNA from an adult. And we are going to take that cell and we are going to put it into a surrogate mother. And then that cell can grow up and create a new baby or a clone of the original adult cell. Now you may be asking yourself, what is this clone going to look like? So I would say to you, follow the DNA. So whatever the DNA is, that is what the organism is going to look like. So again it doesn't matter what the donor of the egg cell looks like. It doesn't matter what the surrogate mother looks like. It is simply that DNA from the original adult cell. Now there are many uses of reproductive cloning. So the first one is used for animals in danger of extinction. So there are certain animals that we have very few of, maybe only a couple hundred, maybe even less than a hundred. And so it is very difficult perhaps for these guys to reproduce on their own. And so we might need an additional means to create more of these animals much more quickly. So if we can find a good surrogate mother, then we can start to use this process, the nuclear transplantation and reproductive cloning, to create a lot more of these animals very quickly. So this has been done successfully for the gray wolf, which we can use a wolf or another dog as a surrogate mother. This has been successful for the mufon where we can use a sheep. So these guys are very similar in their genetics. And for the guar, which looks a lot like a cow, we can again use a cow as the surrogate mother. So not the same species but something that is very similar to its appearance and genetics. We can also use reproductive cloning to create animals for research purposes. So when you are doing a research project or when you are doing an experiment, you want to have one and only one variable. You want to have, for example, a control group and you want to have, on the other hand, an experimental group that receives the drug or receives the treatment or receives whatever. So the only difference you want is that particular therapy. And so if you use reproductive cloning, you can create animals like mice or rats, hundreds of those, thousands of them that have exactly the same genetics. So in theory, they would behave the exact same way. You can also use reproductive cloning to create farm animals. So if you are a farmer and you have a horse that wins whatever those horse races are in Kentucky and things like that, and so you have got a prized horse and you might only have one of them and he might be beyond his normal breeding age. So you can then use reproductive cloning to clone that horse and make a lot of money. Or if you have a prized cow that has certain desirable traits, maybe it's a good milk producer, calves, its babies very well or something like that, again, if you start off with one animal, it's going to take you a very long time to create a herd of those animals to breed and sell. But if you use reproductive cloning and you have an appropriate surrogate mother, you can very quickly expand from one cow to many cows. And then with farm animals, again, you can also reproduce very quickly genetically engineered animals. So if you have a genetically engineered pig or a genetically engineered sheep or something like that, that can produce a useful product for human medicinal purposes, you can very quickly expand that population of those sheeps or those pigs or those other organisms you need. Now there are some limitations. I can't just go out and clone myself. I can't just go out and clone my cat. I can't go out and clone whatever I want because this is very expensive. You need a lot of expertise in order to do this. You need the surrogate mothers in order to do this. So again, very, very expensive. Another limitation is, again, you need those surrogate mothers that are a similar species. So pandas are an endangered species, but we don't have a good surrogate mother for it. So unfortunately, we can't do reproductive cloning for pandas. Also, there's another limitation that you guys might not have thought of, and that's efficiency. So when they were trying to create dolly, the first clone sheep from an adult cell, they started off with 277 nuclear transfers. So that's where we take the nucleus of the adult cell and put it into the egg. They were only able to get out of that 277 nuclear transfers, about 29 embryos. And then they implanted that into 29 different sheep per surrogate mothers, and they got one sheep. So this is a very inefficient process. And you couldn't do this in humans. It wouldn't be ethical yet. And again, there's a lot of ethical issues. Should we do it? Who should be permitted or not permitted to do it? And so right now, at least in the United States, reproductive cloning for humans is absolutely illegal. It's not permitted. Now there is another type of cloning that I mentioned earlier, and that was therapeutic cloning. So again, we start off the exact same way. We do a nuclear transfer. But then instead of putting it into a surrogate mother, we then grow it in a petri dish. And these cells that we grow, depending on what enriched media that we put on them, they can grow into any type of cell in our body, any tissue that's found in our body. And so then we can use these cells. Then we can use these tissues to replace diseased or damaged tissues. So I know one challenge is if somebody gets burns, very severe burns, they've burned away that top layer of skin. And so if you could use therapeutic cloning, you could then grow up more skin cells and then lay those across that burned area and help that person heal much more quickly. And then people are also working to use therapeutic cloning for diabetes, heart disease, and other treatments. But unfortunately, at this time, we can't grow organs. So this technology has not advanced far enough so that we can create an artificial heart or an artificial kidney. But that's something that we're working on.