Word: clones
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...year and a half since Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut presented Dolly, the cloned sheep, to an astonished world, ethicists and policymakers have been struggling with the unsettling implications of his research. Could scientists use Wilmut's method to clone not just sheep but also billionaires, basketball players and bodies grown for spare parts? Should medical entrepreneurs be allowed to pursue cloning wherever it leads? Or should the government step in now and outlaw it before it starts...
...reproductive biologists, these issues pale in the face of two more immediate and practical questions: Is Dolly really a clone--and if so, can anybody make one? It's taken a while, but the answers are finally in. The verdict, according to a trio of reports in the current issue of Nature: yes and yes. Not only have Dolly's pedigree and her immaculate conception been established beyond all reasonable doubt, but she has been joined by litter upon litter of perfectly cloned mice. Cloning has, with a speed no one anticipated, been transformed from an astonishing technical tour...
...Dolly, that is. What Dolly proved is that you don't have to take your chances with fetal cells. You can wait until the litter has grown up, see which individuals have proved themselves to be great producers of wool, milk or--a stretch, perhaps--NBA titles, and then clone the champs...
Wakayama's idea was truly crazy: he wanted to clone mice, long believed to be among the worst candidates for cloning because their egg cells are particularly delicate and their embryos develop so rapidly. He squeezed in the cloning work during his free time, carefully manipulating one type of mouse cell after another until, just months after Dolly was unleashed on the world, he succeeded in cloning the cumulus cells that surround the egg in the ovary. Wakayama's whimsical name for his new creation: Cumulina...
...Conceding defeat in the clone wars, James admitted that ProBio's microinjection method of cloning was "quite a bit more efficient" than the method used to create Dolly. The famous sheep, after all, was born only after 287 failed attempts at stimulating embryos. By contrast, scientists at Honolulu made cloning mice look like baking cookies...