Well! My words of thanks to all those who have made comments on cloning. I can sense some kind of scientific knowledge in VR and TO and of course in MG?s writing! I am happy to see your thoughtful comments here. As u know, those of us who are working in basic and clinical research would of course know in detail about the principle behind the three types of cloning- DNA cloning, Therapeutic Cloning and Reproductive Cloning. When i first started writing on this thread i tried to distance myself from my personal experience in research. I thought that writing too much on scientific details would make those from outside the research field feel uninteresting. Anyway, thanks TO for the detail about the DNA cloning. So i tried to give more emphasis on ethical issues that are associated with reproductive cloning and also with therapeutic cloning. I guess this is the hot topic in the scientific as well as nonscientific circle in USA and may be in the world. With respect to VR curiosity about impact of cloning on the development of Nervous system, this is an interesting aspect and i guess i have already mentioned that "It is true that cloning copies the genetic make up of an individual but it is not necessary that it would copy the intellectual capability of that individual. Cloning can not copy the mental cognition of your brain into the brain of ur clone." somewhere in the series of reply. With respect to MG "A) cloning will not allow us to grow spare organs. At least, it won't work as well. It is better to use cells from the person needing a transplant, get them to regress back to stem cells, and then grow the organ tissue as needed. it's not cloning, it's just a modified form of healing (growing back damaged tissue)". I do not know about the context of her argument and i have not any serious disagreement except that you can not directly regress back any differentiate cell into Stem cell. For the organ transplantation (one of the applications of therapeutic cloning) you need to develop the progenitor of the cell type ur are looking for and stem cell can give rise to those cells if you provide right combination of mitogens and growth factors that stimulate stem cell to produce the differentiated cell types that you are interested in. I was not feeling comfortable with the directly digressing damaged cells back into the stem cells. for the tissue or organ transplantation you need to have pool of stem cells and that stem cell is produced by the Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) technique where you will fuse donar cell Nucleous into the enucleated egg and grow that zygote into the blastocyst stage of the embryonic development and during that stage you will get totipotent (cells that can give rise to almost all the cell types, i guess u have more than 240 cell types in our body) stem cells. Now you can recover these stem cells and differentiate them or directly transplant these cells (based on need and the feasibility of the technique) into the patient's body (donar nucleus is generally taken from the patient?s body so that that would not reject the transplant). Yes, you are right VR that reproductive cloning will prove really a good tool to preserve endangered species of animals and I never meant those people that I listed as endangered anyway!! Hahaha I was here trying to give the political dimension to the misuse of reproductive cloning. No offence at all!! Nut