Persuasive Essay On Xenotransplantation

Though out many years, movies and television shows such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and many others have enlightened our imagination on cloning organisms. Today, it appears that this idea that looked unreachable, now seems to be within our grasp due to our technological leap in genomic science. But we are not interested in just regular cloning, we want to reach for the stars and successfully be able to produce copies of not just other animals, but humans as well. This turns to the new scientific phenomenon that is reproductive cloning. Cloning is a form of asexual reproduction that makes identical genomic copies of the original animal either by producing specific cells or tissue, where reproductive cloning has the ability to clone the entire animal that is produced by a single cell. This process differs drastically from original sexual reproduction. Normal sexual reproduction occurs when a sperm that contains one set of chromosomes (23) reaches and fertilizes with an egg with another set of
This process has also been lead to great strides in therapeutic cloning that can be used for medicinal purposes. One popular example is xenotransplantation, an animal to human organ transplant. Pigs are interesting subjects for xenotransplantation because of their physiological similarities to humans and their ready availability, in contrast to nonhuman primates (McCabe & McCabe 219). I we are able to mass clone organisms, like pigs, this will be beneficial in having a good supply of organs to cure human diseases and abnormalities. Reproductive cloning also gives people the opportunity to genetically create an identical donor. The SCNT procedure has the capability to genetically “resurrect” a lost beloved pet. Lastly, human cloning would provide lesbian couples or single women with the opportunity to have a child without using donor sperm (BioEthics