On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep was born. Her birth was made possible by a British scientist named Ian Wilmut. Dolly is one of the most famous sheep in the world. She is popular because she was the very first mammal cloned from a donor cell from an adult mammal. She was genetically the same as her mother, who was six years old at the time. The cloning of Dolly was a major achievement in genetics. Dolly was euthanized by lethal injection on February 14, 2003 (Nardo, 2007). She suffered from lung cancer and had crippling arthritis (Nardo, 2007). Before Dolly was born, scientists believed that cloning an adult cell was impossible. Since the Dolly, the possible development of cloning technology has both excited and worried people.
Cloning is the production of an organism with genetic material identical to the original organism. Cloning has been around for centuries. Identical twins are clones in the natural world. The creation of Dolly opened the floodgates to animal cloning. Scientists worked in a number of countries worldwide to clone cows, bulls, horses, pigs, rabbits, mice, rats, cats, dogs, and monkeys (Nardo, 2007). The rats and mice are mainly used for research purposes only. Cloned cows have been used to harvest lifesaving medical drugs that are produced in their blood. Cats and dogs have been cloned to duplicate their deceased pets. Scientists are now considering cloning endangered animals. There are a number of endangered species already cloned, including a gaur (wild ox), and a mouflon (wild sheep), which takes scientists closer to human cloning (Nardo, 2007).
During the 1950's, scientists Robert Briggs, Tom King, and John Gurdon experimented with frogs and toad eggs (Morgan, 2009). However, they were unsuccessful in cloning a cell from an adult frog or toad. Their experiments captured the public's imagination (Morgan, 2009). During the 1950's and 1960's, people thought that the experiments they did could be beneficial, and were thought to be encouraging.
