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The Twin Tadpoles:
Well before the whole sheep thing, tadpoles were being cloned like mad. Frogs made it easy for scientists, with those big eggs they have. And the whole trick to cloning is being able to muck about with the animal's eggs. Yes, we'd like to think that cloning is like jamming your face down on a Xerox machine, and 'chunk!'— there's another you. But the sad truth is, cloning is a
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slow, painstaking, and seriously inefficient form of reproduction.
What you do is, you take an egg, and get rid
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of its DNA. Then you get a cell from (in the tadpole's case) an embryo, and you stick it into the egg. That way, if the process |
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works, the resulting tadpole will have the exact same genetic traits as the embryo. As far as reproduction goes, it really doesn't work that well. Nine out of 10 scientists recommend sex over cloning any day!
So what's the point? We like uniformity and sameness. Nature's just got too much chaos!
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