• Question: If our cells can double why cant we clone ourselves

    Asked by y13adefioyep to Sara, John Robert, Jean-Paul, Gemma, Connie, Becky, Alison on 22 Jan 2014.
    • Photo: John Robert Davis

      John Robert Davis answered on 22 Jan 2014:

      Technically we do clone ourselves. Every seven years most of the cells in your body have been replaced. Therefore you are a clone of yourself. And this will happen several times over your life.

      But I think you want to know why don’t our cells just make new copies of us all the time. This is where it becomes complicated. For humans each individual cell in our body is pretty useless by itself. They all need each other. So without other cells helping cells will die. Scientists can help cells along but even that has limitations. So that is why each cell you drop doesn’t just turn into a new you.

      But there species of plant, bacteria, fungus and animals that can just make copies of themselves. The way they do this is different for each one, but the reason they can and we can’t is that during our evolution humans just never needed to copy ourselves, instead we reproduce through sex as it provides more advantages.

Comments

  • Photo: Karolina

    Karolina commented on :

    There is a lot of trouble with cloning. As you might know, scientists managed to clone a couple of animals, amongst which is the well known Dolly the sheep.

    Starting from the begining- what is cloning – to clone an animal, you take a cell from the animals body, take its DNA, put it in an ’empty’ zygote and then fertilise another animal with this zygote and allow the embryo to develop. Biggest problems scientists encountered is the fact that the cells in the animals (or our) body know that they are in an adult body, they have various signals telling them what they are. The telomeres shortened as the cell was dividing in our bodies and the epigenetic marks on the DNA were changed as the cells acquired its final fate.
    So when you take a cell like thta and try to make a new organism out of it- the problem is the the cell knows its already old. That was the problem with Dolly, I believe it died quite early on, because of various problems, that are rarely seen in young sheep.
    So yes, there are many problems with cloning, and that was just the beginning 🙂