s and companions, or watching some of them in the wild. But what else? Technology is now coming up with other ways of using the creatures we share this planet with. Recent developments in genetic engineering suggest we could use them as live "factories" for producing pharmaceuticals in milk or blood (PPL Theraputics Ltd., 1997), or growing organs for human transplants. Whatever use we find for animals, should we clone them so we can be more efficient? I have no problem with the use of livestock for food, but the fact that we kill animals to eat them seems to justify any other use. Why would we want to clone meat-producing animals, anyway? If the root is the supermarket production system, and the incentive of large meat contracts with the major chains, have we missed something important? To manipulate animals to be born, grow and reach maturity for sale and slaughter at exactly the time we want them seems to turn animals in mere commodity. Is this going too far in putting mass production allowing an animal the freedom to be itself. These are living things, which demand respect. Is cloning the point at which we should "hold back"? I would argue that the answer is "yes", but these questions need the most careful scrutiny. And that raises another problem. How do we cope with these questions as a society? How this work relates to Genetic EngineeringCloning is not the same as genetic engineering. Genetic engineering modifies one or two genes amongst a mammal's complement of about 100,000, to make a genetically new animal. Cloning copies the entire complement of genes, without modification, to produce a new individual animal that is genetically identical to its founder. But Roslin and PPL's cloning discovery actually comes out of their existing genetic engineering work. Enhance the ability to do the type of genetic manipulations of animals In 1986 Roslin researchers made the ground-breaking discovery that it was possible to produce therapeutic...
