Word: wilmut
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...WILMUT became the world's best-known embryologist in early 1997, when he and his team at Scotland's Roslin Institute announced that they had cloned a mammal, a lamb named Dolly, from the single cell of an adult sheep. But the science that produced Dolly also gave rise to disquieting questions that still rattle ethicists and policymakers. Managing editor Walter Isaacson met Wilmut at the annual Forstmann Little seminar in Aspen, Colo., last September and engaged him in a lively conversation on the ethics of cloning. "Wilmut expressed his concern that the breakthrough he had wrought would be used...
...mother, sparked a worldwide debate over the moral and medical implications of cloning. Several U.S. states and European countries have banned the cloning of human beings, yet South Korean scientists claimed last month that they had already taken the first step. In the following essay for TIME, embryologist Wilmut, who led the team that brought Dolly to life at Scotland's Roslin Institute, explains why he believes the debate over cloning people has largely missed the point...
...agriculture, in which purely physical characteristics like milk production in a cow or low fat in a hog have real market value, biological carbon copies could become routine within a few years. This past year scientists have done for mice and cows what Ian Wilmut did for Dolly, and other creatures are bound to join the cloned menagerie in the coming year...
...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...