Cloning seems like it has the potential to cure disabilities and diseases, and also make farming easier. With so many potential uses why is it that nothing major has happened since Dolly the sheep?
In: 1789
Some kinds of cloning are easy and we do them all the time.
Dolly was a very special project. She was cloned from mammary cells from a donor showing that you could clone an entire animal from a cell which hasn’t evolved to create whole animals (ie eggs and sperm).
The problem was that eggs and sperms are very different from other cells. Sperm and eggs have all the information to become any cell. Most other cells have shut off certain information to start specializing into particular types of cells.
It turns out that the information is still there in these other cells but we’re not sure how to unlock it correctly. Dolly only lived half as long as sheep of her breed normally do and we don’t entirely know why.
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