Essays on Nuclear Transfer

The advancement of technology has precipitated a revolution in scientific understanding over the last several decades. Advancements in research tools has led to new insights into every facet of scientific discovery within the realms of chemistry, physics, and biology and all the sub-disciplines forming their constitution. Increased discovery has brought with it opportunities for cross discipline cooperation which has resulted in the formation of new disciplines and has galvanized scientists to press the boundaries of research and application as has never been seen in human history. One such field testing those limits is genetics. Today’s geneticists have expanded beyond ...

Introduction

Science, technology when applied to the natural way how a human’s body and all of its corresponding organ systems operate can be referred to as biotechnology. Biotechnology has emerged as one of the most lucrative and fast developing field of medicine combined with technology. It can be defined as the utilization of organisms (e.g. humans, animals, plants, etc.) or any living system to create, develop, or improve products that can be used to make a particular task easier, or more efficient . In an era characterized by rapid and even unpredictable improvements in technology, one can assume that the same rate ...

INTRODUCTION

The human body consists of tissues and organs that contain over 200 different cell types.1 these cells carry out all the functions required for viability and reproduction. It was argued long ago, that in some tissues, the differentiated cells have a shorter life span and that they are not able to self -renew.2 This led to the notion that such tissues are maintained by cells that have an extensive renewal capacity, and the ability to differentiate and generate daughter cells. These cells were termed as ‘stem cells”.2 Stem cells generate only the differentiated lineages of the tissues they reside in, ...

The natural reproductive process involves the fusion of genetic materials from one female and one male parent through sexual contact. The offspring produced bears the combined genetic materials of his/her parents, which is unique on its own. Now, with the advent of technology, an individual may now be produced from a single parent without the need for sexual contact. Cloning is the process or technique used to create an organism that is 100% genetically identical to its parent. The pioneering era of cloning was started in 1952 by biologists Robert Briggs and Thomas King, wherein they attempted to “clone” a frog ...

Cloning has been a particularly intriguing experiment over the years, involving acutely essential milestones and crucial researches. Many hypotheses have been generated; some accepted and others refuted. On 5 July 1996, a domestic ewe, Dolly was born by lan Wilmut and his colleagues. Dolly was the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell (McLaren, 1775). Initially, people, inclusive of scientist, did not believe that somatic cell from an adult individual, could be used to generate a new individual through cloning. However, with the emergence of Dolly, the ideology was disapproved, and, it was with clear conscious that genes could ...