Word: wilmut
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Dates: during 1997-1997
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...doubt, the pro-and-con weighing, the pontificating and the chin pulling will now go into high gear. Wilmut will spawn more ethics conclaves than cloned sheep. No matter. There is nothing to stop cloning, not even of humans...
What the politicians do not understand is that Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life...
...easy, but because its potential for good is so immense. The study of cloning can give the world deep insights into such puzzles as spinal cords, heart muscle and brain tissue that won't regenerate after injury, or cancer cells that revert to embryonic stage and multiply uncontrollably. Replicating Wilmut's work will elucidate what he along the way did right that nature, in these pathologies, does wrong...
...late last week in the journal Nature confirmed what the headlines had been screaming for days: researchers at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, had indeed pulled off what many experts thought might be a scientific impossibility. From a cell in an adult ewe's mammary gland, embryologist Ian Wilmut and his colleagues managed to create a frisky lamb named Dolly (with apologies to Ms. Parton), scoring an advance in reproductive technology as unsettling as it was startling. Unlike offspring produced in the usual fashion, Dolly does not merely take after her biological mother. She is a carbon copy...
What enabled the Scottish team to succeed where so many others have failed was a trick so ingenious, yet so simple, that any skilled laboratory technician should be able to master it--and therein lies both the beauty and the danger: once Wilmut and his colleagues figured out how to cross that biological barrier, they ensured that others would follow. And although the Roslin researchers had to struggle for more than 10 years to achieve their breakthrough, it took political and religious leaders around the world no time at all to grasp its import: if scientists can clone sheep, they...