Dna Essay, Research Paper

11/10/00

Vitaliy Pustovoy

FYE Science 101

DNA & CLONING.

Ever since the beginning of time people were trying to find an answer to a question “Where did we come from?”. During the middle ages church had the answer to this question– allmighty God has created our planet, all the life organisms on in, including humans. However, in the 1800’s a scientist named Dr.Darwin has come up with a theory of evolution, which dramatically changed out perception of the world around us. According to Darwin, humans have evolved from monkeys over many millions of years because they began to make tools so that their simple tasks could be done faster, better and more efficiently. However, in the 20th century, scientists had the technology developed good enough to study the tiny particles of cells in human body. They have discovered the source of all the life on our planet. It’s called DNA– dexy-ribo-nucleic acid. What is DNA? What is the DNA made of? How does it look?

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the primary genetic material in all living organisms.

DNA is a molecule encoding the information of who you are — on every level of your existence. It consists of fine, hairlike strands in coils within coils and it dwells within the nucleus of every cell in your body. It’s form is the double helix. It looks like a very fine, long ladder with innumerable rungs, twisted so that the two legs, or strands, spiral upward around each other, and then coiled up again and again so that it fits in the tiniest of spaces. If all the DNA in any one cell of your body were pulled out of the nucleus and stretched out, end to end, to its full length, it would be over six feet long. Below is a computer generated image of a cross section of DNA as if looking down a tube of it ten base pairs long. It was produced byRobert Langridge of UC, San Francisco, many years ago and is in the public domain. It appeared on the cover of a pretigious scientific journal juxtaposed by an image of stained glass.

In theory, knowing how DNA is structured and the way it works, we can even clone (create exact copy) any life organism on this planet. Cloning animals has already been done and the results were a success! Now scientists want to see what will happen if they try to clone such a complex biological machine as a human being. This could solve many problems with human allergies, deadly diseases, maybe we could even find a cure for aids. On the other hand, how many people would like to have their exact copy (even identical fingerprints) walking down the streets doing who knows what? Or worse, what if someday somebody gets their hands of the president’s DNA; that could cause deadly serious problems. Maybe people should just stop and let the nature take its course… Nah!!! After all, really big bucks can be made doing this cloning business! Who knows what will the future bring our way? We should just lay back and see where all this experimenting with mother nature will get us!!!