For a long time, cloning was the subject matter of sci-fi movies. Then along came Dolly! She was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. Dolly had three sheep mothers – one provided the egg, another DNA and the third was the surrogate mother sheep who carried the embryo to term.
Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 and lived for 6.5 years. The usual life-span of a sheep is 12 years. There was no indication that her death had any connection with her being cloned. An interesting speculation is that Dolly was 6-years-old at birth! This is because the somatic cell that was used to generate her came from a 6-year-old sheep!
Dolly was successfully bred to give birth to 6 lambs of her own. They were named Bonnie, Sally, Rosie, Lucy, Darcy and Cotton. Dolly was the forerunner of many more genetic cloning experiments with pigs, deer, horses and bulls.
Scientists say that the nuclear transfer technique for this sort of process may never be sufficiently safe to use on humans and so for the time being at least, there’s no fear of running into a doppelganger version of you at the corner store!
February 22, 1997 marked the announcement of Dolly’s cloning to the world. This experiment opened up many possibilities in biology and medicine, including the preservation of species and regenerating extinct species from frozen tissue.
Picture Credit : Google
