Passion Project: Cloning

  De-extinction is very much a science in development, but it’s moving at a rapid pace. The first milestone was in 2003 when European scientists resurrected the Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat that had gone extinct a few years earlier. Sadly, the kid died a few minutes after she was born, so the poor ibex was not just the first animal to be brought back from extinction, but also the first to go extinct twice. Since then, scientists have been refining their methods and developing new de-extinction techniques.  they can never be exactly the same. When he is done, Church will have created not a true mammoth, but an elephant with a sprinkling of judiciously placed mammoth DNA. It will have long, shaggy fur, thick rolls of insulating body fat, and haemoglobin that can ferry oxygen around the body at sub-zero temperatures. This will be an animal that looks like a mammoth, but is really an elephant whose DNA has been altered so it can live in the cold. You could call it a ‘mam...

 1938 Cloning envisioned. Dr. Hans Spemann (Germany) proposed an experiment to remove the nucleus from an unfertilized egg and replace it with the nucleus from a differentiated cell. 1970 Dr. John B. Gurdon (U.K.) clones a frog by transplanting the intestinal cell of a tadpole into an enucleated frog egg, which develops into an adult frog. 1996 Dr. Ian Wilmut and his team clone the world's first sheep from adult cells. The lamb born in July 1996 is named Dolly. 1997 Scientists at Oregon Regional Primate Research Center (U.S.) create the first primates—two rhesus monkeys named Neti and Ditto—from DNA taken from cells of developing monkey embryos. They are not genetically identical because two different embryos were used. 1997 A team led by Drs. Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell (U.K.) create the first sheep with a human gene in every cell of its body. The genetically engineered lamb is named Polly. 2000 Japanese scientists clone a baby bull from a bull that was a clone itself, the first...

Cloning is a term used both in traditional biology and in biotechnology. In traditional biology, cloning happens naturally in nature among many asexual species of plants, bacteria, and insects, where identical genetic copies of an organism are created as a form of procreation. In asexual cloning, the only differentiation that occurs happens as a result of random mutation, as opposed to the mingling of different DNA. In biotechnology, the term is used to refer to the intentional cloning of entire organisms or part of the DNA or organism. It is this latter definition that most people mean when they talk about different types of cloning. There are three main kinds of cloning within biotechnology: reproductive cloning (Nuclear Transfer), therapeutic cloning, and DNA cloning. Reproductive cloning is cloning of an entire organism, or at least the nuclear DNA of that organism. This allows a plant, animal, or other organism to be essentially recreated from the same foundational material, altho...