Day4 Cloning

[Summary]
In 1997, a baby sheep named Dolly introduced te world to reproductive cloning. She was a clone because she and her mother shared the same nuclear DNA. Scientists in Scotland created Dolly by a process called "nuclear transfer". Taking the genetic material from an adult donor cell, they transferred it into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material has been removed. Dolly's mother was six-year-old and maybe that's why her telomeres were shorter than normal sheep. Although no one is sure exactly what telomers do, they seem to help protect and repair our cells. As we age our telomeres get shorter and shorter. Dolly appeared to be mostly normal, she was euthanized in 2004 at the age of six, after suffering bad cancer. The average Finn Dorset sheet lives to age eleven or twelve.

[Note]
Clone technology has been one of the taboos especially when it is aimed to be applied for humankind. The human should not create a human. From a religious perspective, only God can create a human, it's a blasphemy, violating the area that the human must not step into. From the humanitarian standpoints, it's also a harmful idea because it would lead us to the idea of elitism. It is supposed to be impossible to judge or compare each human's value, but somehow, we do it. By attractiveness, brightness, sociableness, or the other factors, we do judge and evaluate others. If we could have a right to choose or control the DNA for our offsprings, like changing parameters freely in games? Someone might find it a tempting idea. It's definitely a taboo but it's also true that harmful ideas fascinate us sometimes.

New words and expressions to me
reared :at the back of something
ewe :a female sheep, especially an adult one
embryo :an animal that is developing either in its mother's womb or in an egg, or a plant that is developing in a seed
gland :an organ of the body or of a plant that secretes (= produces) liquid chemicals that have various purposes
telomere : a structure at the end of a chromosome that protects it
strand :a thin thread of something, often one of a few, twisted around each other to make a string or rope
euthanize :to kill an animal because it is very old or sick or because there is no one to take care of it