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Name: marbles
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Question:
How far away are we from cloning humans?


Replies:
Pretty far away, actually -- unless the Department of Defense wants to tell us something. The problem with the whole Jurassic Park theme is that the chemical reactions and developmental processes which occur in the fertilized egg are not that well understood, and so controlling such a process would be extremely difficult in all but the simplest organisms. I think they've actually managed to clone a specific species of toad, which is capable of switching sexes in times of intersexual shortages (That part of the movie/book is fact), by taking the nucleus of a toad's skin cell and inserting it into the membrane of an egg cell from the SAME SPECIES from which the nucleus has been REMOVED -- the egg will now develop into a tadpole and eventually a toad which is genetically identical to the original. However, taking that up a few steps to humans is true science fiction right now.

-- WORDSWORTH


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