Photo: Stuffed Dolly at the Royal Edinburgh Museum
In 1996, at the Rosslyn Institute near Edinburgh (Scotland), for the first time in history, a mammal was cloned from an adult cell. The pioneer, as you, of course, know, was a sheep named Dolly
(Actually, the first mammal (mouse) was cloned in 1987 by Soviet scientists (see the journal "Biophysics", volume XXXII, issue 5, 1987). However, firstly, the scientific world knows nothing about this experiment, and secondly, employees of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow), the Institute of Biological Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Pushchino) and the All-Russian Research Institute of Physiology, Biochemistry and Nutrition of Farm Animals (VASKhNIL) (Borovsk) used cells of early embryos, not adult animals.)
Scientists, as best they could, tried to bring down the euphoria that overwhelmed some ordinary people. They say that cloning is associated with a high risk of failure, stillbirth and hereditary diseases. The fact that Dolly, who suffered from arthritis, had to be put to sleep at the age of only six years (the normal life span of a sheep is 12-14 years), only added fuel to the discussion.
But time goes on, cloning technologies are improving, and now the moment has come when scientists decided that it makes sense to try to remember the country singer Dolly Parton one more time.
Dolly (the sheep, not the singer after whom the clone was named) was created from a breast cell. The remainder of the tissue has since lay quietly in the freezer. It was he who was used at the University of Nottingham (Great Britain) in order to produce four more sheep, which it was decided to call Dollies. How else? They are no different from that Dolly.
Dolly's cloning was a long and painful process. Of the 277 eggs, only one survived. And Professor Keith Campbell and his team only took five embryos per individual born. Of course, it's still far from ideal, but still …
They do nothing with "dollinenki": they live for themselves, graze. They are only being watched. There are no signs of arthritis yet.
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Sheep were born three and a half years ago. Amazingly, until now, information about their existence has never made it to the press. The experiment only became known after Mr. Campbell himself mentioned it at one of his public lectures.
Based on materials from the Daily Mail.
