| A cloning scientist yesterday rejected accusations that his work was exploitative, unsafe and socially unacceptable.
Panayiotis Zavos, of the Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky, claims he can produce hybrid embryos by injecting cow eggs with DNA from humans.
“Cloning” is the duplicating of an organism or other object in biology.
In the English language, this word began to be used (as the biological term) less than 100 years ago. However, during this small life period, this word already changed its meaning several times.
Originally a word "clone" (Eng. "cloning", from Greek κλων - "the branch, shoot, the descendant") was used for a group of plants (for example, fruit trees), received from one plant-manufacturer by a vegetative (not seeded) way. These plants-descendants exactly repeated the qualities of the progenitor and formed the basis for the breeding of a new sort (in the case of utility of their properties for gardening). Later a "clone" began to mean not only whole this group, but also each separate plant in it (except the first). Reception of such descendants got the name "cloning".
After the expiration of time the meaning of the term has extended to the use of the cultivation of bacteria cultures.
The success of biology has shown that at plants, and at bacteria the similarity of descendants to an organism-manufacturer is caused by the genetic identity of all members of the clone. Then the term “cloning” began to be used for a designation of manufacture of any lines of the organisms which are identical to the primary one and are its descendants.
|
