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From duplicate dogs to modern mammoths, cloning has come a long way since Dolly the sheep took her first tentative steps.

By David Cox22nd March 2022

On 5 July 1996, a sheep was born who would go on to inspire entire industries, provide scientists with a new way of helping endangered species, and change medical science in ways that were barely conceivable at the time.

But this was no ordinary sheep. Her very entry to the world was groundbreaking – she was cloned using cells taken from another sheep's mammary gland as part of an experiment conducted by the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, Scotland. They named her Dolly after the singer Dolly Parton.

At that point, scientists had been dabbling with cloning – the process of creating a genetically identical copy of another living being – since the 1950s, when British biologist John Gurdon found a way to clone African clawed frogs. Despite many attempts, repeating the feat in larger mammals had proven an elusive and near-impossible task.

"The cloning of Dolly the sheep showed the world that it was possible to essentially reprogramme all the DNA in the nucleus of an adult cell, so it started behaving like an embryonic cell again, giving rise to a new animal," says Robin Lovell-Badge, who heads the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-why-dont-we-hear-about-cloning-anymore

(Extracted on 03/27/22)