Me, Myself and My Clone

In January 2001, a small consortium of scientists led by Panayiotis Zavos, a former University of Kentucky professor, and Italian researcher Severino Antinori said that they planned to clone a human in the next two years. At about the same time, the New York Post reported a story about an American couple who planned to pay $500,000 to Las Vegas-based Clonaid for a clone of their deceased infant daughter.

These scientists may be chasing glory in the name of science. Whatever their motivation, it's likely that we will see the first cloned human baby appear on the evening news in the next decade. Scientists have shown that current cloning techniques work on animals, but only rarely do they succeed in creating a cloned embryo that makes it through birth.

If human cloning proceeds, one method scientists can use is somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is the same procedure that was used to create Dolly the sheep. Somatic cell nuclear transfer begins when doctors take the egg from a donor and remove the nucleus of the egg, creating an enucleated egg. A cell, which contains DNA, is then taken from the person who is being cloned. The enucleated egg is then fused together with the cloning subject's cell using electricity. This creates an embryo, which is implanted into a surrogate mother through in vitro fertilization. If the procedure is successful, then the surrogate mother will give birth to a baby that is a clone of the cloning subject at the end of a normal gestation period. Of course, the success rate is only about one or two out of 100 embryos. It took 277 attempts to create Dolly. Take a look at the graphic below to see how the somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning process works.

Some scientists seem to think that human cloning is inevitable, but why would we want to clone people? There are many reasons that would make people turn to cloning. Let's explore a few of these reasons.