Word: embryos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mature mammalian cell, although it contained all the genetic information required to build an entire organism, locked the cell into being what it already was--skin or bones or soft tissue. The discovery that the DNA of a differentiated cell could be coaxed into behaving like an embryo was a breakthrough of the first order. Scientists are eager to examine that process more closely, hoping that they might discover by what mechanism individual genes are turned off or on. They might even tease out a few clues about the origins of cancer and hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis and muscular...
...research question proved so divisive, however, that the commission ultimately decided to duck it. The final 107-page report, "Cloning Human Beings," urged the President to keep in place the current moratorium on federally funded human- embryo research while requesting (but not requiring) that the private sector honor...
...right, it won't be more than a few years until they are identified. And then it will be a simple matter to develop a blood test that could be applied to adults, to children and even to fetuses. Perhaps it will eventually be possible to change an embryo's "gay genes" into straight ones...
...enough when Scottish researchers cloned a sheep named Dolly and commentators started writing about virgin births and Frankenstein. But then one week later, researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center let it be known that they had cloned a pair of rhesus monkeys, named Neti (for nuclear embryo transfer infant) and Ditto, that squinted in the glare of the TV lights and clung to each other for dear life...
Lost in the rush of legislative activity was the fact that Neti and Ditto were not so much a step toward a brave new world as a diversion. They were produced from embryos, which makes them clones only in the way that identical twins or triplets are clones. The same technique has already been used with sheep, cattle, rabbits, pigs and even humans--although in the last case the embryonic clones were destroyed. What makes Dolly special is that she was cloned from an adult sheep, not from an embryo. She is the only mammal ever born that is identical...