DNA cloning and reproduction questions

My WIP has quite a bit of genetic research involved. Because mine revolves so much around that theme, I've purchased several titles to help. Some are purely academic, and others are books written by scientists in a more literary style than academic. Here are a few of the books I like, and depending on what you're looking for you can weed out as needed. I'm going to enclose Amazon links for you so you can read about the and look at reviews for yourself. You are also welcome to PM me if you need more.

1. I kept my Anatomy & Physiology text, as well as my biology and biochemistry texts. If you don't have a background in these fields they may be a little too dry to dive right into, but they're still great references.
2. Genome by Matt Ridley: I love this one!
3. Genetics for Dummies
4. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas: This is probably my favorite. It is beautifully written, and it's a collection of short essays on his observations. His thoughts on life, evolution, and biology in general are very interesting. He was a very remarkable man.
5. Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas: I wish this man had written my textbooks; he's so eloquent.

I have a few more, but they may not be what you're looking for. They are incredibly interesting, however, so depending on the areas you wish to cover, they might be of some value.

Another resource that I've used is http://pubmed.gov. I probably wouldn't venture into that site unless you have at least a little bit of a scientific background, but it is a collection of scientific journals that you can search if you need something like that.

Something else I've done is go to a few websites that are quotation databases. I've entered search topics along the lines of biology, genetics, evolution, and the like. It's kind of interesting.

I'm not sure how much more you need, or specifically what specific information you need, but hopefully this helps.

Good luck!

My sister is a research scientist who knows a lot about DNA*. If you want, you could send me a few questions and I could send them along to her.

(*She also told me once about all the things wrong with Jurassic Park after I innocently said, "Gee, it looks so possible! Why aren't they already cloning dinosuars?")

allen

The Selfish Gene by Dawkins
Beak of the Finch* by ?

*haven't read it, but been meaning to!

Here's data I picked up about five years ago on a news show where the ethics of cloning were being debated. It might be outdated by now.

All human cells have strands in them called telomeres. A newborn baby has very short telomeres in all his cells while adults have longer oens. As the newborn baby grows and his cells replicate, the new telomeres are always a just a tad longer with each cell replication. By the time a person is eldrely his telomeres are very very long indeed. (It's been hypothesized that perhaps the purpose of progressivly longer telomeres is that our cells are continuously recording information and passing the info on to the daughter cells. So each new length of telomere embodies some kind of "cellular memory" that gets passed forward. They think perhaps this never-ending chain of bio-memory might be linked to the mechanism of evolution.)

This whole telomere-lengthening thing (according to the data from five years ago) is problematic when you try to clone a person. If you take the cells of an adult man (suppose he's age 30) and then use them to clone a new embryo/fetus/baby, you are starting off with a base cell whose telomere is far too long for a baby. This means all subsequent daughter cells will have telomeres that will all be disproportionately and progressively too long. And they believe this will cause terrible problems for the development of the clone baby, especially when he hits puberty.

One of the problems they have run into when cloning animals (mice, goats, cows, etc) is that the fetuses tend to be really huge, and the placentas also tend to be very very huge (this might be linked to the telomere problem). Such problems of size usually mean those baby animals need to be delivered via c-section.

The ethics for cloning humans get complicated when one realizes that such a pregnancy for a human woman carrying a clone baby for nine months may put the mother at risk if she's carrying to term a human child that is unnaturally large, and also carrying a placenta that is likewise unnaturally large. And what's worse is that the baby that results will perhaps have severe developmental problems all through childhood and into puberty.


Again, all this data is from five years ago. Use at your own risk.