Acute Myeloid Leukemia involves uncontrolled growth of immature blood-cell forming cells or hematopoietic stem cells. Normally these cells differentiate to produce red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. However, in patients with the cancer, hematopoietic stem cells are unable to differentiate and accumulate excessively in the bone marrow. Treatment of the cancer requires not only the elimination of cancer cells (often by chemotherapy), but also replacement of the hematopoietic stem cells.
In the book “My Sister’s Keeper” Kate Fitzgerald is a teenage girl suffering from Promyelocytic Leukemia, a subset of Acute Myeloid Leukemia. When they realize there are no matches for donors within the family, they resort to an IVF procedure to genetically engineer a child that was the perfect donor match for Kate.
After reading “My Sister’s Keeper” I thought to myself, what if Anna was a result of reproductive cloning instead of IVF? First of all, it is important to note that the procedures are similar but different. In IVF, an egg is taken from the mother and and a sperm is taken from the father and they are combined in-vitro to produce a fertilized zygote which is then implanted in the mother. The newborn child may be genetically compatible with Kate, but would not be an identical match. In contrast, reproductive cloning would involve fusing a donated, enucleated egg cell with one of Kate’s cells with electricity and implanting the resulting embryo in Kate’s mother. This process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). If Anna were born through this process, then her genetic makeup would be identical to Kate’s DNA.
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