It seems that ever since the movie Jurassic Park came out into theaters, scientists have been on a cloning frenzy. In Jurassic Park, the lead scientist, Dr. John Hammond, combined DNA from dinosaurs with amphibian DNA to give life to a dinosaur species. He then took that DNA and cloned it to produce more dinosaurs. This movie led scientists to believe they could clone animals just as Dr. John Hammond did in the movie. Scientists have been trying to clone nearly everything from house pets to cows for beef production, with thoughts of cloning humans in the future. Scientists have also been trying to bring back extinct animals into current environments. However, cloning is not as grand as it is hyped up to be. The methods scientists use to clone an animal have a very high failure rate. If the clone is what scientists call successful, then the clone will have a very high chance of having many different abnormalities after birth. Due to the many problems associated with cloning, cloning must be forbidden.

Researchers have been trying to successfully clone for many decades. The first time the idea of cloning became real was in 1885 when a German Biologist, Hans Adolf Edward Dreisch, cloned a sea urchin. According to the Health Sciences Department at the University of Utah, Dreisch separated the two-celled embryo in a process called artificial embryo twinning, which allowed each cell to form into two sea urchins (“The History of Cloning”). In 1902, another German scientist, Hans Spemann, tried Dreisch’s process with a more complex embryo, a salamander. Using Dreisch’s experiment, Spemann found that the process could succeed only up to a certain stage of development depending on which species’ eggs were used. Many years later, in 1952, two American Biologists, Thomas King and Robert Briggs, performed a new process called nuclear transfer with a frog embryo. The Health Sciences Department of the University of Utah states that “Briggs and King transferred the nucleus from an early tadpole embryo into an enucleated frog egg” (“The History of Cloning”). This allowed for the nucleus to form in the new cell, however, this was one of the only successful tries they had completed.

Thirty-two years later, Steen Willadsen, a scientist from Denmark, created the first successful mammal from a nuclear transfer. Using a lamb embryo, he sent an electrical shock to a separated cell to fuse to an enucleated egg – an egg that has had the nucleus removed. He then planted the new embryo into the womb of a different mother sheep, which gave birth to new lambs (“The History of Cloning”). In 1996, after countless tries, Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell produced Dolly, another sheep cloned from an adult somatic cell, which is a cell that has already been formed for a specific function in an animal. After Dolly, scientists wanted to move to bigger organisms, which led to a group of scientists from Oregon in 1997 to take a primate embryo cell and fuse it to an enucleate primate cell. Following Dolly’s and the primate’s birth, questions began forming about human cloning, and controversies began to arise with people wondering if science would continue with human cloning.

Once Jurassic Park aired, it brought ideas and thoughts to scientists about bringing back extinct animals and endangered animals. So in 2001, a group of scientists cloned an endangered species, a gaur – a species of wild cattle. Unfortunately, it died three days after birth. The scientists still consider the experiment successful since the gaur survived past birth. After the cloning of the gaur, a different group used a goat’s enucleate egg cell as surrogates for a bucardo – a Spanish mountain goat, which died shortly after birth as well. Cloning animals was just the first step scientists needed to start cloning humans. Although scientists have not been successful with human cloning, there have been many who have tried, and who are currently trying to clone humans. With minimal change in the process of cloning over time, it can lead to many problems.

One reason cloning should be forbidden is because there is a very high failure rate. The high failure rate is caused by the processes that cell biologists and other scientists use to clone an animal. A process they can follow is called artificial embryo twinning. The Health Sciences Department of Utah University states that in artificial embryo twinning, an embryo is divided into separate cells (“The Risks of Cloning”). One way an embryo can be separated is by a single strand of hair separating the cytoplasm, a similar procedure Hans Spemann performed when separating salamander cells. The separated cells are then inserted into the uterus of a mother, where they finish developing. When separating the cells, the main reason why cloning fails is because the entire nucleus is not collected or it was not separated correctly by the scientist during the process.

Another process that can occur is that scientists first obtain an egg cell from an animal, and then remove its nucleus with a sharp pipette. The scientists will hold the egg cell by using a blunt pipette to keep it in place. They then collect a nucleus from a different animal – the one they want to clone – and place that nucleus into the enucleated egg cell, as shown in Image 1, by using a different sharp pipette. According to an article in Science News, scientists then use a “jolt of electricity or other stimulus to trick an egg into dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm” (Travis 250). After the egg starts dividing, it grows until it’s ready to be inserted into the uterus of a mother animal (Travis 250). For this process, the electricity or other stimulus used to trick the egg to start dividing may cause irregular division, which causes the high failure rate.

At an interview, Rudolph Jaenisch, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated “with cloning, you are asking an egg to reprogram in minutes or, at most, in hours” (Kolata). With these eggs reprograming that fast many problems can occur, causing the rate of success to range between 0.1 to 5 percent (“What Are the Risks of Cloning?”). This means for every 500 tries, zero to twenty-five clones could be made. When scientists cloned a sheep to produce Dolly, they had tried 277 times, only to produce one clone (Park 56). When the scientists cloned the gaur, out of the 692 egg cells, 81 grew and divided into groups of around 100 cells. Out of those 100, 44 were placed through the process of in vitro into 32 surrogate mothers. Out of those 44, only one, which they named Noah, had survived (Begley 56). Because cloning has such a high failure rate, cloning must be outlawed.

When dealing with endangered and extinct species, cloning should not be used to reintroduce the species. First, when cloning endangered or extinct animals, most of the population would lack genetic diversity because there are not that many preserved or live animals to take the DNA from (“Why Cloning Won’t Save Endangered Animals”). With the lack of diversity, it would be very hard for the species to evolve with the changing environment, so if a disease would arise and one animal contracted the disease, the rest of the population would most likely become infected with the disease as well. Along with the lack of diversity, the lack of space is also a problem with cloning for de-extinction and endangered species to reintroduce these animals to the environment. De-extinction is the process of bringing back to life extinct animals. For example in 2003 scientists tried to clone a Pyrenean ibex, commonly known as a bucardo, which is a type of Spanish mountain goat. The last one of the species had died from a tree falling on it (Begley 56). Scientists had predicted and assumed that cloning the bucardo would be faster and easier because of the shorter gestation period compared to the endangered gaur. Although one bucardo survived to birth, the goat died shortly after death (Vogel 2). If there are multiple cloning successes of extinct or endangered animals, there would need to be space in the animal’s natural habitat to re-introduce these animals so they can reproduce and continue living. This is a problem because most of the space where these animals used to live has been either damaged or taken over by humans. Also, if humans truly want to re-introduce these extinct or endangered animals to the wild through cloning, they will have to spend the money and energy to make new space. However, if space and habitats are made, there’s no promise that the environment will be maintained until the animals can thrive on their own.

A main reason animals had become endangered or extinct was because of humans hunting the animals or natural disasters. For example, the mammoth was hunted for its fur and its tusks, the dodo bird was hunted for food, and so was the bucardo. If these animals are reintroduced into the wild, back where their habitats are, there is no guarantee humans will not hunt them again, driving the animals back into extinction. Stuart Pimm, who wrote an article for National Geographic about the hunting of re-introduced animals that stated, “Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs, and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten.” A cabrito is roasted goat, and because the reason the ibex became extinct was that humans hunted it for food, if they bring the animal back, Pimm states that it would just be eaten again. If these animals became extinct again, it would have been a waste of resources to try to have the animals thriving in the wild by cloning. With hunting, loss of resources, and space, cloning should not be continued especially with endangered and extinct animals.

Finally, cloning should be forbidden because if an animal is successfully cloned, there are many abnormalities associated with it that have a high chance to occur. Before birth, pregnancy failure is very common with cloned embryos. A cause of pregnancy failure can be connected to chromosomal abnormalities because of the unnatural division of the embryo through cloning. With chromosomal abnormalities, the missing or damaged genes cause irregular division, which damages the embryo (Schmidt 2). Also with cloning, the embryo may form irregularly, causing the fetus to become extremely large and develop abnormally in the placenta (Schmidt 2). This enlargement is termed large offspring syndrome, or LOS for short. According to Mette Schmidt, an Associate Professor with a PhD in Veterinary Reproduction and Obstetrics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, individuals that have LOS develop “extremely large umbilical veins and arteries and abnormal, asynchronous growth of organs with musculoskeletal deformities” (2). These abnormalities result in large internal organs such as the lungs, heart, and liver. With larger organs, the likelihood of a miscarriage is very high and puts the mother at risk while giving birth. If the animal does not have a miscarriage, the likelihood of weak labor, extended gestation, or dystocia, which is disordered or ineffective contractions of the uterus, is also increased with cloning.

If a clone does survive and has LOS, the animal will be born much larger than normal or have skeletal abnormalities. Newborns may also have oxygen-depravity, which leads into respiratory problems or death (Travis 250). The cloned animal’s bones and muscles also may be abnormally weak after birth, which prevents them from moving. Even if the newborn seems normal, problems may arise later in life. For example, Dr. Ryuzo Yanagimachi at the University of Hawaii cloned mice, and when they were born, they seemed normal; however, they become massively obese even when receiving the same amount of food as other identical mice that were not born by cloning (Kolata). Clones can also develop diseases and other infections more rapidly than normal births. An example of this is when the baby gaur was born, he seemed normal, started to walk and act like a gaur, however, overnight, the guar developed a bacteria called clostridium, which causes diarrhea in newborns, resulting in death the next day even with antibiotics (Vogel 2). With cloning, the embryo can develop incorrectly, which causes many abnormalities, and even death to individuals, which is why cloning should be forbidden because of its unpredictability.

Even with these problems, there are scientists who want to continue from animals on to humans. These scientists want to move forward to use human cloning to treat illnesses. The process scientists would be using is the nuclear transfer process they have been using for many years with cloning animals. Scientists arguing for cloning humans “every species is different, and it remains possible that it will be easier and safer to clone humans than it is to clone other species” (Kolata). However, the same problems are just as likely in humans as they are in any other species. To argue against scientists who want to continue to cloning humans, Rudolf Jaenisch states, “Our experience with animal cloning allows us to predict with a high degree of confidence that few cloned humans will survive to birth and of those the majority will be abnormal” (“Goodbye Dolly…and Friends?” 711). Cloning needs to stop because if it continues, there’s a greater chance human cloning will occur and fail, causing a backlash against science by the public.

Cloning needs to be prevented from occurring because of the many issues associated with the process. Throughout the history of cloning, abnormalities from incomplete division cause a high failure rate. However, even if it successfully births an animal, there is not enough space for the animals to thrive in the wild. People should not look forward to dinosaurs in the future, because there comes a point in science where the energy spent researching and trying to come up with a solution is too great, which is why cloning needs to be stopped now, not later.