You may remember Dolly, the cloned sheep who made headlines in the summer of 1996 when she became the first successful, adult mammal clone. Well, she’s back — sort of.
Keith Campbell, the scientist who experimented with sheep genes fourteen years ago, has cloned four more sheep from the same cells he used to create Dolly. Campbell told the Daily Mail, “Dolly is alive and well. Genetically, these are Dolly,” so as far as comebacks go, returning to the public eye with four of you (or should that be “ewe”?) is pretty impressive.
(See pictures of Dolly the Sheep in 10 Years of Cloning.)
The four clones have been happily living, blissfully unaware that they are in fact a genetic experiment, at Nottingham University in the U.K. and were announced to be in rude health at a recent European Parliament debate on the welfare of animals and cloning.
(They may not be Dolly, but see animals that can think.)
Dolly was a breakthrough in genetic science when she was born at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh in Scotland as she was the first mammal to be successfully cloned from adult cells using a process called nuclear transfer. The experiment proved that the genes in the nucleus of cells can still revert back to embryonic state, even when fully mature. She died in 2003 and was survived by her four children.