Almost everyone around the world has heard of Dolly, the famous

cloned sheep. Still, for those who haven't, Dolly was a sheep "created"
in a laboratory, by manipulating cells, in an experiment Scottish
scientists conducted in 1997. Unlike sheep conceived through sexual
reproduction, from two parents, Dolly had genes identical to those of her
mother. So how can a new organism be created by cloning? How does
cloning work?

Cloning means creating a genetic duplicate of the organism, creating

another organism that has the exact same DNA. Dolly became famous
all around the world, and made it to all news, but actually cloning was
around long before the first cloned sheep appeared. Just think of the
gardeners who like to make copies of a certain plant by rooting a stem
cutting. In nature, single-cell organisms reproduce by cloning when the
cell splits into two new cells with identical genes. Moreover, identical
twins start out as a single fertilized cell, which splits into two, forming
two genetically embryos - clones of one another.

However, even though the articles about cloned animals generally refer
to them as identical copies, actually they're not exactly the same. The
DNA that controls inherited characteristics is located in the nucleus, but
there's also a second DNA source - the mitochondria. The mitochondria
consists of small structures in the cell, involved in energy production,
and are always inherited from the mother, because they're part of egg
cells, not sperm cells. So mitochondrial DNA represents only a small
part of the DNA in a cell. If you create a clone by nuclear transfer, it will
actually not be as closely related to its nuclear parent as identical twins
are related to one another.

In creating Dolly, the scientists removed the nucleus from the egg of a
sheep, keeping the rest of the cell intact. After removing this nucleus,
they took another adult sheep, isolated a single cell and removed its
nucleus. By transferring the nucleus to the egg cell, they created a new
complete cell, with genetic information identical to that of the adult
sheep. This cell divided and formed and embryo, which was implanted
into the uterus of a surrogate mother. Therefore, Dolly developed as a
clone of her parent, the sheep from which the nucleus was taken.

Ever since this experiment was successful, a lot of controversy stirred

around it, because if such procedures worked for cloning a sheep, they
should also work for cloning humans. However, the implications are far
greater when it comes to human cloning, and several other aspects
must be taken into consideration. Just the idea of human cloning has
generated numerous scientific, ethical, religious and various other
dilemmas and polemics. For more info,
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