Cloning is the process of using one organism's DNA to create another organism exactly the same. This process is very controversial and I will be writing about some of the views that people have on this subject. Cloning, like everything, has pros and cons.
The benefits of cloning range from making copies of those who have deceased to better engineering offspring in humans and animals. Cloning also provides a better way of curing diseases such as aids, cancers, etc. At the moment the agricultural industry demands nuclear transfer to provide better livestock. Also, cloning could be use to increase numbers of animals on the endangered species list. Biological proteins would be able to be produced to cure people with diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's and Cystic Fibrosis. Pigs could be cloned to produce organs that would not be rejected by humans. Cloning could give couples who would like children, but could not have any, a chance to have them. This process would also let single women have a child without using in-vitro fertilisation or artificial insemination. Cloning could also make a copy of a deceased child for the parents. Also it would be a very useful tool for historians as people such as Hitler would be able to be recreated and studied to find out what their motivations were.
Besides from all these good points cloning also has bad points. The biggest problem with cloning on a large scale is the lack of genetic diversity. If everyone has the same genetic material, what happens if we lose the ability to clone? We would have to resort to natural reproduction, causing us to inbreed, which will cause many problems. Religious people are completely against cloning. They generally say that scientists are not respecting the fact that humans have souls and we would be taking the work of God into our own hands.
Dolly the sheep was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. The process of cloning used to do this is called Nuclear Transfer. This is done by transferring the information from the nucleus of a cell. The cloning of Dolly shows that cloning is very risky in these early stages. It took the scientists who produced Dolly 277 tries to get it right. And all the way along they produced lambs with abnormalities.

Amazingly, the first attempts at artificial cloning were as early as the beginning of this century. Adolph Eduard Driesch could let the eggs of a sea urchin develop into the two-blastomere stage. Then he separated it by shaking it in a flask and allowing them to grow. The cells developed into dwarf sea urchins. Driesch could not explain his experiments and gave up embryology for philosophy. The first implantation of a nucleus into an egg cell occurred in 1952 by Robert Briggs and ...