Dolly

Dolly the sheep was a normal sheep who caught a disease. Scientists cloned the ewe. The first mammal clone created by the DNA of an adult.

To create Dolly, the scientists at Roslin, (her creators), extracted the nucleus from the udder of a Finn Dorset White sheep. By altering the growth average, they kept the nucleus from growing.

Next, they injected the nucleus into an unfertilized egg cell with no nucleus. It then became an egg cell. They fused the cells by connecting the electrical pulses.

A new problem came up: turning the egg into an embryo. To solve it, the scientists at Roslin cultured it for six or seven days. After it changed, they implanted it into surrogate Scottish Blackface, (the same species that the egg came from).

The success of Dolly's creation spread all over the world. The big news made all the front headlines.

On January 4, 2002, (her 6 year of life), the people discovered that Dolly had Arthritis in her left hind leg and hip at a Strangely young age for a sheep.

One of her creators suggested that the disease might have come from the unnatural process. Like Dolly, many other animals had unusual abnormalities both physically and mentally.

This led to the suspicion that supposedly healthy clones may be physically strange. They also discovered that Dolly might be submit to premature ageing. If so, it probably came from the fact that she was cloned from a six-year-old sheep.

But developing Arthritis could just as well be some little accident in a meadow or a bad stumble. It's almost impossible to decide looking at just one sheep.

Before this, she had shown no signs of illness, giving birth to six healthy lambs.

But a tragic thing happened on February 14, 2003. Dolly died at the age of six due to premature aging. This lead to many doubts in the safety of cloning and we still ponder it.

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