Iran Wilmut is a scientist at PPL Therapeutics firm in London. In February of 1997, he was the first scientist in the world to clone an animal. It was a sheep named Dolly. Since then, Wilmut has succeeded in turning a cows" skin cell into a heart cell. "These were the first people to clone an animal, the first to change the genetic structure of a cloned animal. Now they are the first to change one cell into another and get around the real problem, which is the difficulty in sorting stem cells," said Erling Refsum, a biotechnology analyst at Nomura Securities. Wilmut and his team of researchers are getting closer to closer to being able to clone a human being. "Our estimate is that if all the science goes as well as we can possibly expect, it will be about four years before we get near clinical trials," Erling Refsum. Cloning human cells could one day your life and the lives of the people you love.
The procedure of cloning a human being would be very similar to the cloning of dolly. Using somatic nuclear transfer, Wilmut and his team of researchers inserted the nucleus of an adult udder cell into a sheep egg cell whose nucleus had been removed. When the egg with the new nucleus begins to divide, Wilmut implanted the developing embryo into the uterus of another sheep, the surrogate mother who gave birth to Dolly. Similar to the case of dolly, "An egg would be removed from a woman's ovary and its genetic material removed. Cells would be taken from the human being cloned and the genetic material from these cells would be injected into the egg. The human embryo would then begin to grow in a dish in the laboratory. In a few days, the embryo would be implanted into a woman's uterus to grow into a baby and eventually be born." Said Iran Wilmut.
When cloning a human being, the clone and the original copy would be similar to identical twins. They look almost exactly alike, but they have minds, souls, and personalities of their own.
