12/6 Video and Reflection

Link to Cloning Video

          To clone or not to clone is the question that mankind has been asking for a very long time now. Cloning describes the process that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a living body. The copied thing, has the same genetic makeup as the original and is referred to as a clone. When considering to clone something there is a lot of ethical reasons that prevent people from justifying it’s alright to clone it. Human cloning is the most talked about when considering if its ethical. Most people don’t understand what cloning is or means to scientists. There are three types of cloning, gene, reproductive, and therapeutic cloning. The possibilities are endless but good things always come with a cost.

            I decided to make a video slideshow to inform my target audience. Instead of me trying to convince someone why or why not to clone I thought I could make a more convincing argument through video and music. In my video, I didn’t take any sides when discussing my topic because I didn’t want it to sound biased at all. I think the music does a good job or keeping the viewer focused on the information and gives a sense of importance. Throughout this introduction video to cloning, I discuss different types of cloning, give some advantages and disadvantages, as well as some comedic relief to help keep the viewer’s attention.  I also decided to include slides without information, yet still relative to my topic in order to allow the viewer to process any information they have read in the previous slides. Each of the slides has a transition effect for a smooth switch between each of the slides.

             A fellow classmate commented on my cloning research paper saying she “knew little about the topic and hadn't realized that cloning had different forms and many scientific benefits”. This is exactly how most people are when it comes to cloning. This influenced my writing very little because she was telling me something I already knew from my research and prior knowledge of cloning. In a way it projected me more towards what I already planned on doing. This comment told me that I needed to inform people with the different types of cloning and their upsides and downsides.  That’s why I made the informational introduction video to cloning. My target audience was anyone interested in cloning as well as the people who stand against it. I believe the little bit of information I tell them is enough to sway not all but some of the opinions of cloning whether it be for or against it. As for me, I think we should continue research in cloning as it could become the very thing that saves us from the downfall of mankind. Now one might be thinking, well if we clone more people than we would need more food and we already don’t have enough of that. That’s not exactly what I think cloning should be used for, I think we should allow the use of cloning to continue making genetically modified organisms or animals which we need for food. Cloning could also help with increasing the lifespan of humans through the use of the medical field and by potentially making the future human race less susceptible to diseases.

            The three types of cloning come with there own advantages and disadvantages. A fellow student wrote “reproductive cloning is the most dangerous topic to talk about. On one hand you have the pros that you could clone a family dog that passed away and on the other it could be used in cloning human beings”. Reproductive cloning is when you create an exact copy of a living organism. This type of cloning is frowned upon for ethical reasons. It takes many attempts to create a healthy clone because most of them don’t take. People also believe that the clones life is less valuable because there are now two of the same person, making the copy not unique from everyone. Reproductive cloning can have some great benefits such as bringing back extinct animals or just helping endangered ones survive. It also could be used to bring back people which could be potentially dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. They could make armies of soldiers from one person. Another type of cloning is gene cloning. Gene Cloning is used to create segments of genes in DNA. This is used to eliminate defects in the genetic code of any organism. This could help get rid of any birth defects that may have been passed on from the parent’s genes. It could also be used to help create stronger plants and animals that could survive better or grow in harsh climates. The last type of cloning is therapeutic cloning which produces embryonic stem cells for experiments aimed at creating tissues to replace injured or diseased tissues. The possibility to create parts of the human body such as a heart or liver could help people who need transplants greatly. Cloning could be used to create a new superior human race, one capable of higher feats are less prone to dieses and injuries.

            Scientist Lee Silver said during an interview with NOVA, “95 percent of them said they were against human cloning” referring to a survey he had given. He says people just don’t understand what it means to scientists when you clone something. They see cloning as a way to replicate a human being and it soul. People were scared that scientists had gained control over the human life. This is not how Silver sees human cloning though. To him the only thing that a clone is is an organism that has the same genetic information as another organism. He continues to say that people eat clones all the time. Bananas are all produced by cloning and so are seedless grapes. Cloning happens all the time just not in the way people think when they hear the word clone. “In 1979, researchers produced the first genetically identical mice by splitting mouse embryos in the test tube and then implanting the resulting embryos into the wombs of adult female mice.”  In 1996, researchers succeeded in cloning the first mammal from a mature adult animal. It took 276 attempts but Scottish researchers finally produced Dolly, the lamb from a cell of a 6-year-old sheep. Since then cattle, cat, deer, dog, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat have all been successfully cloned. There is also some belief that a human clone named Eve was created back in 1998 but the company Clonaid didn’t provide any information that could prove if she was. It was believed Clonaid also cloned 12 other people after Eve but there was still no information proving this theory. Besides the 13 theoretical human clones, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human embryo, but the experiment was shut down early due to ethical reasons. South Korea proved that we can clone humans if we eventually get past the ethical boundaries. Another reason human cloning isn’t happening is because of the difficulty in successfully cloning a human. The process is much more complicated because our genetic structure is slightly different from most mammals. A protein known as the spindle protein is located close to our chromosomes in the eggs and when removing the nucleus to replace it with another the proteins are removed which causes the cell to not be able to divide.

            As you can see, there are still many problems with human cloning ethically and technically. While most people continue to believe that cloning is wrong and immoral, scientists continue trying to find better ways to successfully clone humans and other mammals that may have become extinct. Human cloning has a place in our future and I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon. It holds the solutions to many of our current problems such as cancers and organ failures. It could potentially be used to replace lost limbs of soldiers and people who were born with defects. Cloning is becoming a part of the future reproduction of humans and animals whether people want it to be or not.

Citations

"Cloning - Google Search." Cloning - Google Search. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.

Jessa Pamonag, Owner at DUP (Dota University of Philippines) Follow. "Cloning." Share and Discover Knowledge on LinkedIn SlideShare. N.p., 11 July 2013. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.

"Cloning Fact Sheet." National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). NIH, May 2016. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

By Veronique Greenwood. "Genetically Engineering Babies With Less Disease-and 3 Parents-Seems Safe - 80beats." 80beats. N.p., 21 Apr. 2011. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

"Human CLoning." PBS. PBS, 2001. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

11/17 Novel Reflection

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a good example of how cloning could be used. Clones come in all shapes and sizes and copies of robots are still clones. In the graphic novel I read, they show how clones can be used to make armies of soldiers, human and robot to fight battles for them. I think this shows a good and bad side to cloning but still provides some detail to what cloning can really do. The show you that cloning can be used to create and army of people so we don't have to go to war. They also show you that anyone can make a army of people and just start a war. As you can see, the advantage and disadvantage kind of balance each other out and you can't really take a side on the argument based on this information. Star Wars wasn't written with the intent of arguing for or against cloning yet it does a decent job of showing you what could happen if we started to clone people. It also shows you that the life of a clone is less valuable than the life of someone who wasn't created in a lab. In Star Wars many clones get hurt but no body stops to check if the are alright but when a jedi or a human gets hurt, there is always someone there to help them.

11/10 Review Reflection

A good review describes the goals of the project being reviewed and how it accomplished or didn't accomplish those goals. It gives a personal opinion and tells you why it deserves to be its given rating. I recently read a review that opened with "After watching the trailer, the kids and I agreed that viewing the film would be an hour well-spent–and it was." This is a great way to start the review because it says that the two minute overview was good enough to make an entire family watch a hour plus film. The review then goes on to give some background information of the film by quoting a description of the film. It gives you enough detail to know what the film is about if you didn't want to watch the trailer. "The film artfully captured our attention from the beginning with its juxtaposition of a typical morning routine for two college friends in the U.S." This line tells the reader that the film can be related to by most people which allows people to feel more attached or into the film. They go through explaining the main points of them film and the questions and struggles that the students faced. After talking about the film they explain how they felt and how any support no matter how small still helps people greatly. They then finish there review by recommending the film to a target group of people which in this case was families. 

11/1 Reflection

Human cloning was a very interesting topic for research. I decided to make my target audience for this piece future scientists of America. I feel like if I can get people to continue doing research and show the possibilities from cloning then the people of America and the rest of the world will follow suit. As of now cloning and specifically human cloning is mostly frowned upon by most of society. It seems that only those who are interested in the sciences are the ones who are really for human cloning. A person who doesn’t understand science so well doesn’t see what cloning really means and why it will and should become a more welcomed thing. The articles I based my research off of are from very creditable companies. Discover, NIH, and PBS are three companies which have built a good reputation and are known for writing quality articles. Based on my readings, I do think there is still plenty of research to be done and that regularly cloning humans will not be a thing for a very long time. They need to make the cloning more successful than it currently is or it will never be allowed just because it’s so close to this ethical boundary of who’s right it is to create people or in a sense play god. When talking to a group of future scientists of America and trying to sell my pitch, I didn’t receive the responses I expected. About half of the group said they would have no part of human cloning, but when asked if they knew anything about it they would respond with the typical answer of you just make a copy of someone. While this is for the most part true it’s not the real goal of cloning. This 50% of people didn’t understand why cloning is something that could greatly benefit the human race. The other 50% of people were a of course we should and a depends. The person who responded that we should definitely clone people was the oldest of the group and studying in what I believe to be the most involved form of science, premed. The other a younger biology major who doesn’t quite get what cloning is or could mean for people but they still think it would be beneficial to clone people who deserve to be. After this discussion I had with my fellow future scientists, I came to the conclusions that not enough people know why cloning could be so beneficial to humanity. There just isn’t enough of a voice about cloning and its possibilities to push people to believe that it’s the necessary thing to do. No one was really saying that we need to do this and the reason is because it’s just not ready to be done. No matter how many times you tell someone how great something is they won’t truly believe you until they see it for themselves and this is why cloning will not become a more talked about thing until the science can back up the possibilities. This is why my audience is future scientist of America and not the general population. I believe that we need more research to be done and in order to have that we need more scientists willing to devote their time and potentially lives to making cloning more successful and appealing to the general populous. 

11/1 Research Paper

Cloning describes the process that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a living body. The copied thing, has the same genetic makeup as the original and is referred to as a clone. When considering to clone something there is a lot of ethical reasons that prevent people from justifying it’s alright to clone it. Human cloning is the most talked about when considering if its ethical. Most people don’t understand what cloning is or means to scientists. The three types of cloning, gene, reproductive, and therapeutic each have there own benefits and draw backs. 

Scientist Lee Silver said during an interview with NOVA, “95 percent of them said they were against human cloning” referring to a survey he had given. He says people just don’t understand what it means to scientists when you clone something. They see cloning as a way to replicate a human being and it soul. People were scared that scientists had gained control over the human life. This is not how Silver sees human cloning though. To him the only thing that a clone is is an organism that has the same genetic information as another organism. He continues to say that people eat clones all the time. Bananas are all produced by cloning and so are seedless grapes. Silver explains that cloning can benefit humans by lowering the risk of birth defects the kids are born with. A UK national health panel found a way to swap chromosomes between eggs so the offspring don’t inherit disease causing mutations from their mother’s mitochondria. This process is considered a type of cloning and is just the first step to making humans less perceptible to many common birth defects. By adding in the genes of a third person who doesn’t have a history of the target birth defect and removing the parent’s gene that does, you can reduce the risk that the child is born with the targeted defect. Some of the dieses that can be prevented are type 2 diabetes, deafness, blindness, and neurological problems. This process of swapping chromosomes is currently being tested on people after being successful in attempts on other animals. But there’s another ethical quandary here, it involves the destruction of the donor egg after it’s been fertilized. Also some people see the egg donor as a third parent which is not completely true. The child may be receiving new mitochondria from a third person but the mitochondria don’t affect the genes of the child which are tested when determining who the parents are. Mitochondria are similar to a battery in some technological device and your genes are the information on the device. When you change the battery, you are not effecting the information stored on the device. This is also true for when swapping the mitochondria in humans. This procedure of swapping mitochondria can make it possible from women with high amounts mitochondrial dieses to have a healthy baby.

Reproductive cloning is what everyone thinks about when they hear the term cloning. While reproductive cloning is a one of the three types of cloning it’s not the only form. The other two types of cloning are called gene and therapeutic cloning. Reproductive cloning produces an exact copy of the whole animal. This type of cloning is used when you want to use only one set of genes instead of splitting two sets which is how babies are formed naturally. Another form of cloning is gene cloning which produces copies of segments of genes in DNA. This type of cloning can’t be used to clone humans and it has not been used to clone any animals as of 2016. It allows scientists to take parts of someone’s DNA and replace it with another person’s DNA to see how that segment effects the specimen’s behavior. The third type of cloning is therapeutic cloning which produces embryonic stem cells for experiments aimed at creating tissues to replace injured or diseased tissues. The possibility to create parts of the human body such as a heart or liver could help people who need transplants greatly. Cloning could be used to create a new superior human race, one capable of higher feats are less prone to dieses and injuries.

 “In 1979, researchers produced the first genetically identical mice by splitting mouse embryos in the test tube and then implanting the resulting embryos into the wombs of adult female mice.”  In 1996, researchers succeeded in cloning the first mammal from a mature adult animal. It took 276 attempts but Scottish researchers finally produced Dolly, the lamb from a cell of a 6-year-old sheep. Since then cattle, cat, deer, dog, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat have all been successfully cloned. There is also some belief that a human clone named Eve was created back in 1998 but the company Clonaid didn’t provide any information that could prove if she was. It was believed Clonaid also cloned 12 other people after Eve but there was still no information proving this theory. Besides the 13 theoretical human clones, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human embryo, but the experiment was shut down early due to ethical reasons. Another reason human cloning isn’t happening is because of the difficulty in successfully cloning a human. The process is much more complicated because our genetic structure is slightly different from most mammals. A protein known as the spindle protein is located close to our chromosomes in the eggs and when removing the nucleus to replace it with another the proteins are removed which causes the cell to not be able to divide.

As you can see, there are still many problems with human cloning ethically and technically. While most people continue to believe that cloning is wrong and immoral, scientists continue trying to find better ways to successfully clone humans and other mammals that may have become extinct. Human cloning has a place in our future and I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon. It holds the solutions to many of our current problems such as cancers and organ failures. It could potentially be used to replace lost limbs of soldiers and people who were born with defects. Cloning is becoming a part of the future reproduction of humans and animals whether people want it to be or not.

Citations

"Cloning Fact Sheet." National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). NIH, May 2016. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

By Veronique Greenwood. "Genetically Engineering Babies With Less Disease-and 3 Parents-Seems Safe - 80beats." 80beats. N.p., 21 Apr. 2011. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

"Human CLoning." PBS. PBS, 2001. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

10/20 Rough Draft 30%

Cloning describes the process that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a living body. The copied thing, has the same genetic makeup as the original and is referred to as a clone. When considering to clone something there is a lot of ethical reasons that prevent people from justifying it’s alright to clone it. Human cloning is the most talked about when considering if its ethical. Clones can occur naturally in some specimens such as plants and single celled organisms. There has never been a human clone that occurred naturally, twins which seem to be close to being clone are actually just as far from a clone as we are. A clone is someone who is identical to their parent or person they were created from. There are three types of cloning, the frist called gene cloning which produces copies of genes of segments of DNA. Reproductive cloning produces an exact copy of the whole animal and Therapeutic cloning produces embryonic stem cells which are used to create tissues. When people think of cloning they only consider reproductive cloning, they don’t think about the other two types of cloning which can benefit the human race very significantly. The possibility to create parts of the human body such as a heart or liver could help people who need transplants greatly. Gene cloning could be used to create a new superior human race, one capable of high feats are less prone to dieses and injuries. These are just some of the possibilities from cloning.

A UK national health panel found way to swap chromosomes between eggs so offspring don’t inherit disease causing mutations from their mothers mitochondria. This is just the first step to making humans less perceptible to many common birth defects. By adding in a the genes of a third person who doesn’t have a history of the target birth defect and removing the parents gene that does, you can reduce the risk that the child is born with the targeted defect. Some of the dieses that can be prevented are type 2 diabetes, deafness, blindness, and neurological problems. This process of swapping chromosomes is currently being tested on people after being successful in attempts on other animals. But there’s an ethical quandary here, it involves the destruction of the donor egg after it’s been fertilized. Also some people see the egg donor as a third parent which is not completely true. The child may be receiving new mitochondria from a third person but the mitochondria don’t affect the genes of the child which are tested when determining who the parents are. Mitochondria are similar to a battery in some technological device and your genes are the information on the device. When you change the battery, you are not effecting the information store on the device. This is also true for when swapping the mitochondria in humans. This procedure of swapping mitochondria can make it possible from women with high amounts mitochondrial dieses to have a healthy baby.

10/18 History with the Library

Between page and screen by Amaranth Borsuk

The library is a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to. I have only been there a few times since coming to college. Even in high school I only went to the library because the class required it. Since I came to Syracuse i have been in the library only three times. All three times were this year, the first being to print out my resume for the engineering career fair. The second time I had to staple one of my homeworks together for one of my classes. The last time i cam to the library I was expected to actually look at books and first one to check out. I didn't even know where to begin, I started by climbing each flight of stairs just to realize there wasn't any signs saying take this book. So I went back to the first floor where i had saw the new books section upon entering. I looked at a few books before seeing this little all red book. It was filled with nothing but pictures and i thought it would be perfect. A assignment in which I taking pictures of a book with only pictures, it just made sense. So after i found my book i had to find a place to check it out. I looked for the nearest desk and it just happened to be the right place. I gave her my book and card, made a joke about how this book was perfect for this assignment, and then put the book in my bag and went home. This was by far the most involved trip i have ever had to the library since i left high school. Even in high school i didn't do much looking around in the library. I asked the librarian where i could find a specific topic and i took the first book related to my research. As you can tell, me and the library are not the best of friends, we rarely ever see each other and when we do, its short and to the point.