Cloning Endangered Species

Cloning of animals is one investment that should be denied funding. Scientists all over the world have been attempting for decades to perfect the cloning process of animals. All the problems that could occur to terminate the cloning process before the clone has a DNA sequence that can be capable of giving life to a creature. The numerous amount of clones that never see adulthood is a waste of technology, time and funding. Cloning to save endangered species sounds like a fantastic idea, but realistically with the technology is not sufficient enough to perform these requests.

Researchers go beyond the normal when it comes to the DNA used to attempt cloning. Two contributors to cloning figured out they could harvest sperm, umbilical cords and blood from roadkill that can be frozen and preserved. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation and the Brasilia Zoological Garden collected over 420 samples from various animals. Countries seem to be in a scientific evolutionary race with one another. Just like the countries involved in the space race, countries are in a competition to be the first to successfully clone an animal. The first successful animal cloned were northern leopard frogs in the 1950’s. The Lankenau Hospital Research Institute successfully cloned frog by a process called nuclear transfer. Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned the frogs by extracting the nuclei of empty eggs, then proceeding to extract the nuclei of frog embryos and replace them with the nuclei from the empty eggs. . Scotland showed the world that they are a force to be reckoned with. They introduced the world to Dolly, the first female Finn-Dorset sheep to be cloned. With over 300 attempts to procreate only 30 embryos were created. Of those 30 onl...

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...end in failures. The few that make it past the first stage of nuclear transfer have problems developing.

Cloning is a very good idea but with the lack of technology needed to make it a successful tool in science it should not be a main focus. Scientists should be putting their times and their energy into figuring out the reasons for the endangered animals population instead of trying to make more the non natural way. Alought it may be more accepted than the cloning of humans it is still a subject people do not mind avoiding.

Works Cited

Genetic Science Learning Center. "What are the Risks of Cloning?." Learn.Genetics 27 March 2014

"Will Cloning Ever Save Endangered Animals?." (2013): n.pag. Scientific American. Web. 31 Mar 2014. .