Since around 8th grade, I’ve been interested in a very outlandish career: Therapeutic Cloning. This is using cloning to create parts of an organism, rather than the entire organism. This can stretch from cloning a heart to save people on the waiting list, to cloning someone’s limb as to avoid using a prosthetic limb. Due to the outlandishness of a career like this, I had to develop skills and learn some things that would help me with this career.

 

One thing that I already knew about but got a deeper understanding of was how cells work. When it comes to cloning, cells are essential. The very first step of cloning requires something called stem cells, cells that turn into almost any other cell in the body. However, due to my research as part of my Genius Hour, I already knew of these. What I did learn more about was the specifics of cells. I learned about things like how they split and reproduce through the cell cycle, and how DNA is replicated. Understanding how cells grow and reproduce is fundamental to cloning. As one could imagine, when cloning, you would start with a single or a few cells. Knowing that they go through a cycle where they grow, synthesize, and produce, and what happens during these steps has given me a deeper understanding of the main “ingredient” in cloning. Before I didn’t really know the specifics of the cell cycle, such as the G1 Phase, S Phase, G2 Phase, and Mitosis (M Phase). Now that I know of this cycle, I can monitor cells and understand what happening in them in greater detail. Of course, DNA is also important when it comes to cloning. DNA is within the cell, and has to be replicated before the cell itself can divide. DNA is the instructions of life, so understanding everything I can about it, especially when I plan to be working with it, helps when trying to understand what is happening in a group of cells at an even deeper level. I now know, that like a cell, DNA is replicated in a cycle, which is a part of cell cycle.  So, as I monitor a cell going through its replication cycle, I could watch even deeper as DNA goes through mitosis. Having an understanding of these led to understanding something even more important, Cell Specialization.

 

Cell Specialization, also called Differentiation, is how stem cells become other cells that do a specific task in the body. Stem cells have the ability to create all proteins, but only create a select few. These selected proteins determine what type of cell that stem cell ‘turns’ into. This specialization of cells is what separates Therapeutic Cloning from Reproductive Cloning. Most people, when they hear cloning, think of just Reproductive Cloning, where an entire organism is cloned. In Therapeutic, only parts of an organism are cloned. Knowing how cells specialize and how to specialize cells is how ‘therapeutic cloners’ (for lack of better term) create organs for patients, whether they make an arm or heart. They get the stem cells to specialize to become Heart Cells, or whatever other needed cells. Understanding this process could be one of the most important parts of the job.

 

Other skills are necessary when working than just the skills that pertain to that field. In such an unknown field, with much room for growth, being able to ask the right questions and research could make all the difference. One project we did in biology when we were studying the brain pushed us in terms of our inquiry. We had to develop our own experiment to see how our brain functioned in certain conditions. I tested reading speed while listening to music compared to not listening to music. This is just an example of the needed inquiry for a field that could grow in so many ways. The need to research, to delve into the unknown to make it known, is what inquiry is about, and if I can apply that to a job like Therapeutic Cloning, then I could be the person that completely innovates an industry no one thought could happen.