Word: clone
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...name the scientists behind the first cloned house pet gave their creation, a shorthaired calico that is a genetic (though not a visual) duplicate of her biological mom. Because she is so seductively cute--pulling at the same heartstrings an infant human clone would invariably tug--she lays bare the emotional subtext that has so far been missing in the great cloning debate. It's one thing to argue the merits of cloning when you're talking about uncuddly sheep, mice, cattle, goats and pigs. It's quite another when the clone is practically sitting in your lap, mewing...
...that making cc was particularly easy. The work was overseen by Mark Westhusin, an associate professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and backed by Genetic Savings & Clone, a private company whose financial benefactor wanted to clone not a cat but an aging border-collie mix named Missy. Dogs, however, don't ovulate regularly, as cats do, and, for reasons not fully understood, dogs' ova don't mature well in laboratory dishes. So after almost three fruitless years, Westhusin and his colleagues turned their attention from canines to felines...
Once scientists cloned run-of-the-mill livestock like Dolly the sheep, could exotic endangered species have been far behind? Meet Noah the gaur, the first endangered clone. The gaur is a species of wild ox that is fast disappearing from its native India and Burma. Noah started out as a skin cell on an adult gaur that was fused with an empty egg from an ordinary cow and then brought to term by another cow named Bessie. Scientists hope that similar operations will someday be a practical way to keep endangered species alive. Too late for Noah, however...
...that's really what this kind of cloning is about. "Our intention is not to clone human beings," insists ACT medical director Dr. Robert Lanza. Instead, the company's goal is to make embryonic stem cells, the so-called starter cells that can turn into any sort of body tissue, from brain to bone to blood. In theory, stem cells might be used to treat any disease in which cell death is a factor: diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, paralysis, stroke and more. And while stem cells can be harvested from aborted fetuses, that source is abhorrent to abortion...
...affect ACT, which is privately funded, but stem cells from aborted fetuses are problematic in any case. Like any foreign tissue, they can trigger rejection; ideally, doctors would prefer to get stem cells from a patient's own body. The most direct way to do that is through cloning, and ACT scientists took the first steps in that direction by two different techniques. In one, they stimulated an unfertilized egg to begin dividing on its own. In the other, they removed the nucleus from a donated egg and inserted that of an adult--the same method used to produce Dolly...