Past Experiments  

          One of the most known cloning experiments is Dolly.  Dolly is a sheep that was cloned in 1996.  She was the first animal cloned from adult cells.  It took 277 tries to successfully clone Dolly.  The cloning process for Dolly was very complicated as is any other.

When you cut yourself, new skin grows over the cut. This is very important while you are healing or growing and even means we can grow some cells. In contrast, a newly fertilized egg contains 'stem' cells, which are capable of becoming any of the hundreds of different types of cell in the body. The challenge faced by Dolly's creators was to take a fully programmed adult 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 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 1996, and her birth was announced in early 1997.  She died on Friday 14, 2003.  She had been suffering from a progressive lung disease.

Another clone was CC, short for ‘Carbon Copy’.  CC was the first cloned kitten.  She was born on December 22, 2001.  She was cloned from eighty seven cloned embryos implanted into eight female cats.  The idea to clone a cat came from a man who wanted to clone his dog.

  In 1998 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 dog cloned.