Word: ewing
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...Baaa Humbug Dolly may not be as ewe-nique as she was purported to be. But duplication fans need not worry...
LOUISVILLE, Ky: Don't tell Dolly, but she may have been a mistake. The Scottish scientist who cloned the world's most famous ewe more than 12 months ago now reports a "remote possibility" that he used a fetal cell to create her rather than an adult cell. What's the difference? About a year's worth of attention from the world press, since scientists have been able to "clone" animals from fetal cells for about two decades now. As Ian Wilmut of Scotland's Roslin Institute sheepishly admitted to a genetics forum at the University of Louisville, fetal cells...
Dolly is a carbon copy of her mother, grown from a cell taken from an adult ewe's mammary gland. The father, in a sense, is embryologist Ian Wilmut, who as a boy wanted to be a farmer but, after a summer of laboratory work, became enchanted by the magical progression of embryos from amorphous balls of cells into living entities of exquisite complexity. In the pursuit of the advancement of animal husbandry (and, by extension, human nutrition and health), he began experimenting with cloning at Scotland's Roslin Institute. His vision was the creation of genetically engineered farm animals...
Call it the Dolly dilemma. The surprise announcement in February that a sheep had been cloned from the mammary cell of an adult ewe immediately raised the question of whether the same technique could be used to clone people. While the possibility of cloning opens up a new and exciting line of scientific study, it also seems to violate ancient taboos. To help sort out the issues--and to get the jump on a conservative Congress--President Clinton took two swift steps: he called for a moratorium on the use of federal funds for human-cloning research, and he asked...
...fact is that the cloning of that ewe was, at heart, a triumph of human embryology. Before Dolly, scientists believed that the DNA of a 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...