First, there were The Boys From Brazil
not to mention a lof of other science fiction:
like, for example, the cloned dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park:
Then came Dolly, the cloned sheep:
Then came the AskThe ScienceBlogger weekly question: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?…
What followed were (not in chronological order) a bunch of other cloned animals, including:
some cute mice:
piglets: Millie, Christa, Alexis, Carrel and Dotcom:
a rhesus monkey, a male named Andy (a female named Tetra came shortly afterwards):
the infamous (because of his creator) Snuppy, the Afghan Hound:
two calves, named Pora and Potira
and Annie:
and Fufu:
Prometea was the first cloned horse:
Pieraz the first cloned racing champion:
Here’s a cat named Nicky:
And the more famous (for being first) cloned cat CC (here pictured with genetic mother Rainbow and surrogate mother Allie):
Finally, the most famous of them all, the cloned mule, Idaho Gem:
What has all this mammalian cloning accomplished? Hopefully, a more widespread understanding of what non-mammalian cloners were saying all along – you do not get an identical copy by cloning. It’s not the DNA that matters, it’s what cellular machinery is reading that DNA.
CC does not look anything like its genetic mother. The cows do not have markings like their genetic parents. I doubt Pieraz will be a great champion. The piglets received quite different scores on a battery of behavioral tests. Idaho Gem actually did much better in a mule race then his twin brother, a cloned mule named Idaho Sam – they did not end the race in a dead heat and neither one had a champion-style finish that their genetic father used to exhibit.
I hope that all these examples will decrease the irrational fear that some people have of cloning. It is not making little Hitlers. It is babies. With their own looks, abilities, quirks and personalities. If you are looking for an identical copy of your pet, sorry, you’ll be dissappointed. If you are looking for a fertility treatment, perhaps some of the stuff learned over the last ten years can be useful to you and your physician. If you are looking for an organ-donor for yourself, think again – it is not a copy of you, it is a different human being with its own feelings and its own human rights.
So, for some it will be a disappointment, for others it will offer hope, but most importantly, the stigma of the word “cloning” is going to go away and, in the process, hopefully people will understand that DNA is not a blueprint – it is just a catalogue of parts which the cell uses to make more cells.
