The latest and greatest advances in biology

Although much of what we know about ourselves and the world we live in comes from years of discovery and research, in the last 25 years there have been a wide variety of groundbreaking discoveries in biology .

One breakthrough that you will undoubtedly be told about during your biology classes is the cloning of Dolly the sheep. In 1996, scientists  successfully cloned a sheep  for the first time using adult cells from the mammary glands in  a process called nuclear transfer .

The sheep, later called Dolly, grew up normally and completely and went down in history. Since then, scientists have been able to clone more species, even trying to reproduce extinct animals using scientific technology to try to save endangered or recently extinct species.

Will the time ever come when we talk about  the cloning of human beings? Listen carefully to the biology lessons and you can find out!

Like the previous discovery, many more scientific research projects have been called into question , say, when it comes to their  ethics.  An extremely controversial topic is the research of gene editing  in early human development that has the ability to modify the genetics of a human embryo.

Gene editing could end  inherited diseases, which is of course a very valuable procedure, but many fear that control will be lost and that people will make decisions about the fetus. For example, the concern is that people will have the freedom to  determine the gender of their baby, for example, which for many is unnatural.

However, while some may be against scientists’ interference with the human body, many good things have come out of this research and much is yet to come.

Two of the most important advances in biology are  stem cell research,  which allow doctors to treat blood disorders or cancers,  and  biomedical research,  which has led to robotic limbs being controlled by the brain using neural signals.The latest and greatest advances in biology