• Question: when will we be able to clone people?

    Asked by Paddy to Anna, James, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 11 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by bennyboy.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      Hi Paddy,

      We cloned Dolly the Sheep twenty years ago and I’m sure it wouldn’t take a huge amount of work to develop this into cloning human’s. However, there are lots of ethical issues and I can never see a situation were scientists would be allowed to do research into full human cloning so I don’t think we ever will be able to, because we won’t be allowed.

    • Photo: Anna Ashton

      Anna Ashton answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      Hey Paddy,

      We are probably close to being technically able to clone something that looks and acts a bit like a human now.

      However the genetics of humans (and other mammals, including Dolly) are very complicated and there’s still lots of things we don’t know so it may not be a very good clone and so may not live very long.

      For example, there’s a part of genetics called epigenetics.
      This is when you get different biological characteristics that are not caused by your DNA. These characteristics can be inherited from your parents even though they are not passed on through their DNA.

      So this means that just cloning a human’s DNA may not make an exact copy of that human, because the epigenetic parts haven’t been copied. We don’t know enough about epigenetic stuff yet to be able to control it though.

      I hope I haven’t lost you and that helps answer your question!

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