Dolly the sheep is a female Finn Dorset and lived from 1996 to 2003. She is the world's first clone of an adult mammal, produced by Ian Wilmut, a British developmental biologist and his colleagues of the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Her birth is a significant milestone in science, dispelling decades of presumption that adult mammals cannot be cloned. It also brought several possible uses and misuses of mammalian cloning technology. So how does it works?
In cloning, scientists extract the DNA from the cell of an adult animal like cows -called the donor- is extracted and inserted into an egg cell of another cow. The nucleus of the egg cell is removed to accomplish cloning the donor.
The new embryo is then zapped with electricity so that it starts multiplying and becomes a blastocyst and then implanted into a surrogate mother. The resulting newborn will become the identical replica of the donor animal.
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