Passion Project: Uses of Cloning

 De-extinction is very much a science in development, but it’s moving at a rapid pace. The first milestone was in 2003 when European scientists resurrected the Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat that had gone extinct a few years earlier.

Sadly, the kid died a few minutes after she was born, so the poor ibex was not just the first animal to be brought back from extinction, but also the first to go extinct twice. Since then, scientists have been refining their methods and developing new de-extinction techniques.

 they can never be exactly the same. When he is done, Church will have created not a true mammoth, but an elephant with a sprinkling of judiciously placed mammoth DNA.

It will have long, shaggy fur, thick rolls of insulating body fat, and haemoglobin that can ferry oxygen around the body at sub-zero temperatures.

This will be an animal that looks like a mammoth, but is really an elephant whose DNA has been altered so it can live in the cold. You could call it a ‘mammophant’ if you like, or an ‘elemoth’.

We could use DNA from preserved mammoths to create elephants with mammoth-like qualities © Getty Images

Added to that, we now realise that all animals are a product of their DNA and of the environment in which they live, along with the interaction between the two.

Created in a lab, nurtured in the womb of a modern elephant, and raised in a world that has changed radically since mammoths went extinct thousands of years ago, the experiences of this new-age pachyderm will be different to those of its Ice Age doppelganger… all of which will conspire to make it less similar to the original woolly mammoth.

In order to understand how organ cloning might work, let's first talk about cloning itself. The most common method of therapeutic and reproductive cloning is somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). SCNT involves removing the nucleus from a donor egg, and replacing it with the DNA from the organism meant to be cloned. Scientists could potentially clone organs with SCNT by cloning embryos, extracting the stem cells from the blastocyst, and stimulating the stem cells to differentiate into the desired organ. Coaxing a human stem cell to become a liver, for instance, will require further research. Scientists can reverse engineer cell differentiation processes to understand what chemical or physical signals stem cells receive to properly differentiate. However, that genetic information isn't known for all of the more than 200 types of body cells 

Xenotransplantation, or transplanting animal organs into humans, has also been examined as a potential source for organ transplants. But if our bodies sometimes reject transplanted organs from other humans, how would they react to animal organs? In 2002, University of Missouri scientists cloned pigs that lack one of two genes called GATA1, which are primarily responsible for inducing that rejection response in humans. Though primates would make more genetically suitable candidates for xenotransplantation, pigs are the best alternative until monkey cloning is a more viable option

Citation:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/de-extinction-can-we-bring-extinct-animals-back-from-the-dead/

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/cloned-organ-transplant.htm