Cloning chronicles: from dolly sheep to “copies of human souls”

Abstract

In 1996, Scottish researchers successfully cloned Dolly’s sheep. The birth of this seemingly ordinary white sheep was of enormous importance to science and divided the world into “before” and “after”. In 1928, German embryologist Hans Spemann, together with his student Hilda Magnold, transplanted somatic cell nuclei for the first time using amphibian embryos. Several decades later, in 1962, Oxford University professor John Gerdon reported that he had successfully cloned a South African frog. In 1996, scientists at the Roslin Institute - Jan Wilmut and Keith Campbell - reported to Nature about the birth of Megan and Morag sheep, created using embryonic cells. Dolly became the first animal to emerge from another adult’s body using somatic cell nuclear transplant technology.