Biotechnology in animals: Cloning and Transgenic Animals

Sometimes people think that biotechnology is a complicated topic, and it is true that nowadays this topic has more relevance than years ago. But even in the past biotechnology was used to ferment products and other processes. Biotechnology means the application of living beings or biological processes to find a solution to a problem.

Nowadays biotechnology is a polemic topic because of the risks that this process could have for the animals and humans. Most of people think that the purposes of biotechnology are not ethics because they are experimenting with animals. What we can say about it? To give an answer first we need to know what the scientists are doing with the animals.

The scientists are applying two famous biotechnological processes: Cloning and Transgenic animals.

A lot of people know about Dolly, the sheep. Dolly was cloned in the year 1996. In this technique scientists can take identical cells of an animal and then create another one.

With this process people could reproduce animals in dangerous of extinction or even they could create organs for humans. The livestock industry could reproduce animals with a better genetic and have more production.

Other biotechnological technique is transgenic animals. Those animals are genetically modified. Scientists could add a gen to change a characteristic of the animal or they can remove a gen too. For example, they can add a gen to a cow to be more resistant of diseases. 

What people think about these techniques?

About cloning some people think that the process is cruel because a lot of animals have a painful death in a few weeks. Others born with defects or diseases. 

About transgenic animals is worse because some scientists use animals for bad experiments. That's the case of "knockouts". The scientists remove a gen of an animal to know what the function of the gen was. Some generations after they can discover what kind of gens are necessary to develop a specific disease. They use monkeys to experiment with them, but a lot of times they infect the monkeys with terrible diseases like cancer. The animal suffer until death, so obviously a lot of people disagree this experiments.

Biotechnology could help people but at the same time could be bad for animals. The governments of each country had to check the laboratories if a company experiment with animals.