Who invented cloning animals

The gaur and mouflon were chosen in part because they are close relatives of domestic cattle and sheep, respectively.

In , using goast as egg donors and surrogates, another group of researchers cloned the first extinct animal, a Spanish mountain goat called the bucardo. Sadly, the one kid that survived gestation died soon after birth due to a lung defect. Researchers took a cell from an adult monkey and fused it with an enucleated egg cell. The embryo was allowed to develop for a time, then its cells were grown in a culture dish.

These cells, because they can differentiate to form any cell type, are called embryonic stem cells. This experiment showed that nuclear transfer in a primate, which researchers had tried for years without success, was possible. It opened the door to the possibility of human therapeutic cloning: creating individual-specific stem cells that could be used to treat or study diseases.

Overcoming decades of technical challenges, Mitalipov and colleagues were the first to use somatic cell nuclear transfer to create a human embryo that could be used as a source of embryonic stem cells. The resulting stem cell lines were specific to the patient they came from, a baby with a rare genetic disorder. In this experiment, researchers took a skin cell from the patient and fused it with a donated egg cell.

Key to the success of the experiment were modifications to the culture liquid in which the procedure was done and to the series of electrical pulses used to stimulate the egg to begin dividing. Following the cloning controversy of —, in which South Korean scientists falsely claimed to have used somatic cell nuclear transfer to create embryonic stem cell lines, the scientific community demanded much stronger evidence that the procedure had actually been successful.

Home Cloning The History of Cloning. The History of Cloning. Lost in the midst of all the buzz about cloning is the fact that cloning is nothing new: its rich scientific history spans more than years. The landmark examples below will take you on a journey through time, where you can learn more about the history of cloning.

Sea urchin Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch The sea urchin is a relatively simple organism that is useful for studying development. Salamander Hans Spemann Again using a strand of baby hair tied into a noose, Spemann temporarily squeezed a fertilized salamander egg to push the nucleus to one side of the cytoplasm.

Frog Robert Briggs and Thomas King Briggs and King transferred the nucleus from an early tadpole embryo into an enucleated frog egg a frog egg from which the nucleus had been removed. Frog John Gurdon Gurdon transplanted the nucleus of a tadpole intestinal cell into an enucleated frog egg.

Rabbit J. Derek Bromhall Mammalian egg cells are much smaller than those of frogs or salamanders, so they are harder to manipulate. Sheep Steen Willadsen Willadsen used a chemical process to separated one cell from an 8-cell lamb embryo. Sheep Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell All previous cloning experiments used donor nuclei from cells in early embryos.

Sheep Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell In this landmark experiment, Wilmut and Campbell created a lamb by transferring the nucleus from an adult sheep's udder cell into an enucleated egg. Most know of no one even considering the feat. And the cloning of animals remains limited—although it is likely growing.

Some agricultural cloning is used in the U. He used adult cells—first in mice, although the technique is now feasible in human cells—to make stem cells that can form a wide range of other cells, essentially turning their cellular clocks back to infancy so they could mature into different adults. Because they are artificially created and can have a variety of futures, they are called induced pluripotent stem or iPS cells. Previous researchers had derived adult frogs from embryonic frog cells or embryonic frog cells from adults—at which point their development stalled.

Dolly died on February 14, , at age six from a lung infection common among animals who are not given access to the outdoors. It probably had nothing to do with her being a cloned animal, says Wilmut, now an emeritus professor at the The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh where he did his initial work. The sheep, made from breast cells, was famously named after Dolly Parton, the American singer known for her large chest as well as her voice.

Rather, it helped humanize a research project that might otherwise have seemed detached from everyday life. He and his colleagues were trying to make clones from fetal cells and used adult ones as experimental controls—not expecting that they would actually generate an embryo of their own.

But interest in that idea has declined with the rise of inexpensive synthetic chemicals. Wilmut says he thinks it would be possible to clone a human—but highly unadvisable.

Since then, there have been many breakthroughs in cloning. In , British biologist John Gurdon cloned frogs from the skin cells of adult frogs. On July 5, , a female sheep gave birth to the now-famous Dolly, a Finn Dorset lamb — the first mammal to be cloned from the cells of an adult animal — at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.

Since Dolly, many more animal clones have been born , and the process is becoming more mainstream. Research has also been conducted on human-cell cloning. In , scientists at Oregon Health and Science University took donor DNA from an 8-month-old with a rare genetic disease and successfully cloned human embryonic stem cells for the first time. Unfortunately, the researchers didn't remove the cells to save the child.

The project was to prove that mature donor cells could be used to produce new ones. This research has evolved into using stem cells for many different applications, including hair regrowth, treatments for burns and more. Several companies are currently providing services that use cloning technology. Even plants are being cloned. One company is cloning maple trees to provide lumber for guitar-makers, with the aim of duplicating a quality in the wood, called figuring, that gives a guitar a sort of shimmering appearance.

There are many other applications for cloning. Single-celled organisms like bacteria make exact copies of themselves each time they reproduce. In humans, identical twins are similar to clones. They share almost the exact same genes. Identical twins are created when a fertilized egg splits in two.

Scientists also make clones in the lab. They often clone genes in order to study and better understand them. To clone a gene , researchers take DNA from a living creature and insert it into a carrier like bacteria or yeast. Every time that carrier reproduces, a new copy of the gene is made. Animals are cloned in one of two ways.

The first is called embryo twinning. Scientists first split an embryo in half. Each part of the embryo develops into a unique animal, and the two animals share the same genes. The second method is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Somatic cells are all the cells that make up an organism, but that are not sperm or egg cells. Somatic cells, on the other hand, already contain two full sets of chromosomes. The egg develops into an embryo that contains the same genes as the cell donor.

In , Scottish scientists cloned the first animal, a sheep they named Dolly. She was cloned using an udder cell taken from an adult sheep. Since then, scientists have cloned cows, cats, deer, horses, and rabbits.