What is Cloning and is it Ethical?

Author: Karen Liu

Editors: Tharindi Jayatilake and Anand Soma

Arist: Karen Liu

Cloning—the process of producing organisms with identical DNA—seems very futuristic, but it has been happening in nature for a long time. Asexual reproduction in certain plants and animals, binary fission in bacteria, and identical twins are just a few examples. The world’s most famous clone, Dolly the sheep, was the first mammal to be cloned by an adult cell. Dolly isn’t the first-ever clone to be produced in the lab though, as several non-mammal animals were cloned as early as the late 1900s including salamanders and frogs. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), there are three types of cloning: gene cloning, reproductive cloning, and therapeutic cloning.

Gene cloning, or DNA cloning, is the process of creating copies of specific ge