Word: wilmut
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Still, Dolly would be just a laboratory curiosity if no one could repeat Wilmut's breakthrough. And that's where Teruhiko Wakayama comes in. He's a 31-year-old Japanese postdoctoral student who was studying cloning as a hobby at the University of Hawaii, where his lab director, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, was famous for telling students "not to be afraid of asking crazy questions. The crazier the better...
...technique was almost identical to Wilmut's except for two key steps. First, instead of using electric shocks to coax an adult cell into merging with a host egg whose nucleus had been removed, Wakayama injected just the adult nucleus into a nucleus-free host. And second, he let the hybrid cell sit for up to six hours before stimulating it to start dividing...
...must have done something right. Where Wilmut got only a single cell to flower into an embryo and then a full-term fetus, Wakayama got dozens; up to 3% of his clones survived. That may be in part because his technique treated the cells more gently. It's also possible that injecting just the nucleus introduced fewer contaminants into the host cell...
WHOM YOU'LL SEE Bob Dole, Scott McNealy, Linda Wachner, Harvey Golub, Steve Case, Lou Gerstner, Richard Meier, Dr. Ian Wilmut and Colin Powell...