Finding a winning formula

A science-writing competition formed part of the festivities marking this week's visit to Ireland by James Watson, the Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA's double helix.

Student teams were asked to prepare a newspaper supplement entitled DNA Times, using it to describe the past 50 years' progress in genetic research.

There were dozens of entries, and the standard was extremely high. The shortlist included students from Dominican College, Galway, Alexandra College, Dublin, Loreto College on St Stephen's Green in Dublin and St John Bosco Community College in Kildysart, Ennis, Co Clare.

The three fifth-year entrants from Dominican, Ruth Waldron, Ella Tyrrell and Victoria Shevlin, led by teacher Pat Lally, went on to win the competition with a superbly written and beautifully presented supplement. They were declared winners at Watson's lecture at Trinity College in Dublin on Monday. Their award was presented by the Tánaiste, Mary Harney.

They received a certificate to mark the event and an all- expenses-paid trip to Cambridge University, where Watson and his colleague Francis Crick discovered the double helix in 1953.

The following is but one article from the team's supplement. Featuring a picture of Dolly the cloned sheep, it was headlined: "Is Cloning BAA . . . D?"

CLONING is a commonplace process in biotechnology and genetic engineering, where it is used to create cultures of identical cells for study. A well-known and natural form of clones is identical twins. For now and for the long-term future, cloning of primates is very tricky. This is because humans and animals start as one cell that divide into millions of cells with different functions. Copying all the different types of cells that make a cloned human or animal is out of the realm of possibility for now.

Experiments have been done on amphibians where nuclei from adults have been induced to grow into tadpoles, but so far the tadpoles have failed to grow into adults.

There are many myths about cloning, often based on bad treatment in science fiction or as portrayed in movies. One of the most common myths is that a clone is an identical copy of the donor with identical body, personality, skills and memories.

Transgenic clones can be directly beneficial to humans, other animals and agriculture in many ways. They may be developed for tissue and organ transplantation. Although not yet a reality, there is a promise that large animals can be genetically designed and cloned so that their tissues and organs will not trigger immunological responses in the recipient and cause them to be rejected. Also, domestic animals can be genetically designed to express a certain human disease and therefore serve as models for the study of human illnesses.

Transgenic cloning can also be used for the genetic improvement of livestock related to milk production, quality of meat, growth rate, reproduction, nutrition, behavioural traits and resistance to diseases.

It is known that there are two theoretical ways in which humans could be cloned. The first way involves splitting an embryo into several parts and creating many new individuals from that embryo. The second method involves taking cells from an existing human being and cloning them, in turn creating other individuals that are identical.

The technological problems and ethical issues surrounding cloning are virtually impossible to avoid, but the idea of cloning humans cannot be written off. Cloning captured public attention when Scottish scientists at the Roslin Institute startled the world by announcing the birth of a sheep named Dolly that had been cloned by combining the nucleus of an adult mammary cell and an enucleated sheep egg.

Ruth, Ella and Victoria also answered some frequently asked questions about cloning.

Is cloning unnatural?

No. Some organisms in nature only reproduce using cloning. Not only bacteria and yeast but also larger organisms, like some snails and shrimp and plants such as daffodils. Because in nature sexual reproduction is the only way to improve the genetic stock of a species, most asexual species tend to die off.

Would a clone have a soul?

Though we are not theologians, if you grant souls to identical twins and to the various kinds of test-tube babies already being born, then it follows that a clone would have one, too.