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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Re: cloning a mutant hybrid?
libfemme ( 04/09/2004, 19:41:28 )You've got contradictory 3 subjects going here. Do you want to make a clone, a genetically identical individual? A Mutant, which means it would have genes that had never existed before, or a hybrid, an organism that has genes that have existed before, namely from another species?Hybrid's exist now. Most of the insulin sold to diabetics is now completely human insulin because the human gene for insulin has been spliced into a harmless bacteria (E.coli). Diabetic no longer have inject themselves with pig or cow insulin, because E.coli bacteria using a human gene make human insulin in vats in laboratory. The side effects and allergies associated with using foreign insulin are gone for diabetics.A second thing to consider is just what is a gene specific to one species but not another? All life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor, which means copies of the genes in you are also in fruit flies, yeast and chimpanzees. It is estimated that 50% of the genes in a banana, mostly those that deal with cell metabolism, are identical to the genes in a human for metabolism. So are there any species unique genes?There was a very famous experiment done in the 70's that showed the gene for making an eye in the mouse is the same gene for making an eye in a fruit fly. That is, if you take the gene for the eye from a mouse and splice it into a fruit fly's genome, the gene makes a compound fruit fly eye, not a mouse eye. The gene behaves appropriately depending upon which organism it is in, but it is the same gene, the same sequence of DNA nucleotides in all species.So deciding what is a hybrid and what is not is not so easy. As for a mutant, most mutations are neutral. They make little difference one way or another. The next largest group is disadvantageous or fatal. A mutated gene can cause the individual not to develop at all. Only a minority of mutations end up being useful or beneficial. So mutating genes is probably not a dependable way of making an improved individual or acquiring traits you are interested in. You are probably far better off finding the trait you are interested in residing in another organism and then scutting that gene out and recombining it with your own, i.e. making a genetic hybrid.Or finially you can make a clone, in which case you are making a genetically identical copy, i.e. something that by definition is not a hybrid or a mutant.
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