Word: celling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doesn't even happen in amphibians, those wondrously regenerative little creatures, some of which can regrow a cut-off limb or tail. Try to grow an organism from a frog cell, and what do you get? You get, to quote biologist Colin Stewart, "embryos rather ignominiously dying (croaking!) around the tadpole stage...
...what hath Wilmut wrought? A fully formed, perfectly healthy mammal--a mammal!--born from a single adult cell. Not since God took Adam's rib and fashioned a helpmate for him has anything so fantastic occurred...
What the politicians do not understand is that Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life...
...like a contrail. The landmark paper published late last week in the journal Nature confirmed what the headlines had been screaming for days: researchers at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, had indeed pulled off what many experts thought might be a scientific impossibility. From a cell in an adult ewe's mammary gland, embryologist Ian Wilmut and his colleagues managed to create a frisky lamb named Dolly (with apologies to Ms. Parton), scoring an advance in reproductive technology as unsettling as it was startling. Unlike offspring produced in the usual fashion, Dolly does not merely take after her biological...
...also easy to imagine the technology being misused, and as news from Roslin spread, apocalyptic scenarios proliferated. Journalists wrote seriously about the possibility of virgin births, resurrecting the dead and women giving birth to themselves. On the front page of the New York Times, a cell biologist from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, named Ursula Goodenough quipped that if cloning were perfected, "there'd be no need...