On February 22, 1997, the world was informed of the birth of Dolly the sheep. Who was cloned from an udder cell of an adult sheep named Eve in Scotland. Many people panicked at the idea, if a mammal had been cloned, they assume that a human clone would not be too far away. (Yout,. et all pg9) .
Cloning is not a relatively new idea, as far back as 1938 German Scientist Spemann proposes a "fantastical experiment" to transfer one cell's nucleus into an egg without a nucleus, the method that would eventually be used in the cloning of Dolly the Sheep. But at that time no one was able to successfully conduct the experiment. (Yout, Lisa.,et all pg 13) It was not till 11 years after the death of Spemann, that cloning - by adding an isolated nucleus to an egg whose nucleus has been removed - succeeds by Robert Briggs. Briggs at the time thought cloning was a long shot and so did his sponsor the National Institutes of Health, which paid for the research. But there were no further development (Kolata, pg 61).
In the late 1960's, John Gurdon, a developmental biologist at Oxford University tried the experiment again, instead he used cell from intestinal lining of tadpoles of South American frog, The Xenopus Laevis. Scientists like to use them in experiments because they develop quickly. Gurdon reported that he was able to successfully clone sexually matured frogs by method of cloning. Even though the experiment only works for about 2 percent of the time, but Gurdon has proven his point. Fully specialized cells have all the genetic information needed to direct the development into an adult organism. (Kolata, pg 67).
Dr. Karl Illmense of the University of Geneva and Dr. Peter Hoppe of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me, claimed that they had successfully transplanted the nuclei of mouse embryo cell into mouse eggs and produced three live mice who were clones of the embryo. Their Mice were put on the cover of the prodigious Journal Science, and their work created a feeling of sensation.
