Animal Cloning

Dolly the Sheep

Dolly the sheep was one of the first cloned animals.  She was born on July 5, 1996.  It took 277 tries to successfully clone Dolly.  Of those, some of the sheep came out profoundly malformed.  Dolly, however, came out very healthy.  A little of the process that was used on Dolly was used on a few other experiments as well.  

Dolly’s creators had to take a cell and de-program it. Scientists replaced the nucleus of the egg cell with the nucleus from the parent cell, an udder cell in Dolly’s case.  Somehow, the cell reprogrammed the DNA contained within its new nucleus, and Dolly was the result. The resulting embryo was implanted into the womb of a third sheep. Dolly was born on July 5,cells

 1996, and her birth was announced in early 1997.  She died on Friday 14, 2003.  She had been suffering from a progressive lung disease, not from deformations of the cloning.

Copy Cat

Carbon Copy, or CC for short, was the very first cloned cat.  She was born on December 22, 2001.  She was cloned from eighty seven cloned embryos implanted into eight female cats.  Her birth was announced on Valentine’s Day after DNA analysis confirmed that she was indeed a genetic clone.  She was cloned from cumulus cells, which surround mammalian eggs before ovulation. This is not an easy cell type to gain access to if the technique were to become widely used.

The idea to clone a cat came from a man who wanted to clone his dog.

The Missyplicity Project    

A man named John Sperling the founder of Genetics Saving & Clone, donated 3.7 million dollars to fund the cloning of his mixed-breed dog, Missy.  They named this project The Missyplicity Project.  This began in 1997.  The news spread quickly. Calls and emails poured in from people around the world who wanted clone their own pets. Dr. Sperling and other members of the Missyplicity Project founded Genetic Savings & Clone in February 2000 in response to this demand.

Missy died at age 15 in 2002 before efforts to clone her had succeeded. Her DNA remains available for use in cloning, thanks to gene banking.  We still believe ongoing research efforts will result in Missy being the first cloned dog.

Picture of Missy courtesy of:  http://www.savingsandclone.com/about_us/missy.html