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Sunday 11 May 2014

Cloning

The first cloning of an animal was done in the 1880s by German biologist Hans Driesch who cloned a sea urchin from an embryo cell.

In 1952, Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned a northern leopard frog.

It was not until 1963 that biologist JBS Haldane coined the term “clone”.

Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was born on July 5, 1996. The cell was taken from a mammary gland.

A close-up of Dolly in her stuffed form. By Toni Barros from São Paulo, Brasil -Wikipedia Commons

She was named ‘Dolly’ as, in the words of the project leader, Ian Wilmut: “We couldn't think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton's.”

Dolly the cloned sheep was put to death after premature aging and disease marred her short life and raised questions about the practicality of copying life.

On March 2, 1997 Pope John Paul II issued a statement condemning any experiments which attempted to clone humans. This followed successful experiments by British scientists, who after cloning a lamb claimed that human cloning would be possible within a couple of years.

Pope John Paul II By José Cruz/Abr - Agência Brasil [1], CC BY 3.0 Wikipedia Commons

A Chinese scientist claimed around the same time, that China has been conducting cloning experiments on animals since 1993 although authorities in China, worried by these claims, also demanded a ban on human cloning.

Years before the first human clone was announced, 19 nations agreed to prohibit the practice on January 12, 1998.


In 2002 the company Clonaid announced the birth of a cloned human baby, although it has yet to present any verifiable evidence.

The first dog to be cloned was born in South Korea on April 24, 2005, and was named Snuppy.

Snuppy was named as Time Magazine's most amazing invention of 2005.

The team that produced Snuppy went on to create the world's first cloned sniffer dogs in 2007. The six dogs, all named Toppy, started work for South Korea's customs service in 2009.

In May 2013, a group of scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov published a report of successful creation of embryos using using infant and fetal cells.

In April 2014, a team led by Robert Lanza, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, announced they had successfully used Somatic-cell nuclear transfer to clone adult cells.

Zhong Zhong (born November 27, 2017) and Hua Hua (born December 5, 2017) are identical crab-eating macaques that were created by Chinese scientists through somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the same cloning technique that produced Dolly the sheep. They are the first cloned primates produced by this technique.


The reproductive cloning of humans is banned under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Sources Europress Family Encyclopedia 1999, Daily Express

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