• Question: Would it be wise to clone animals to save them?

    Asked by dalunchboxchina to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Seyyed on 20 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      Very good question. The trouble with cloning animals is that you reduce the variation within the population. Imagine if your class was full of “yous”. Everytime you got a cold they would too. If you had a disease that killed you, all the yous in your class would die too and the population would be gone – its the same in the animal world – variation lets us adapt to our environment.

      It woul dbe better to protect the endangered species and do it naturally without cloning.

    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      You mean to save a species from becoming extinct?

      With any attempts to do this, the size of the ‘gene pool’ can be a problem. If you only have a few individuals from a species, then they won’t have much variety in their genes between them. So if you try and rescue them by breeding with each other (or kind of with themselves if you want to use clones….I guess you’d need at least one male and one female clone!!) then you may end up with inherited diseases.

Comments