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Dolly the sheep was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell in 1996. Other animals have been cloned since, including Turkish Angora cats that were genetically modified to glow red under ultraviolet light. Cloned animals can be useful for studying genetic diseases, but cloning is controversial. Cloning studies date back to 1885 with sea urchins and have advanced to producing human embryonic stem cells in 2013.
When we hear the word “clone”, most of us think of “Dolly” the sheep. It was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. Dolly was born in 1996 and was put to sleep in 2003 due to lung cancer. While they may not be as well known, other creatures have been created by cloning after Dolly. For example, in 2007, South Korean scientists cloned Turkish Angora cats. Scientists have not only succeeded in cloning the cats, they have also successfully modified their genes to produce red fluorescent proteins. So when ultraviolet light was held onto them, the cats glowed red. One might wonder about the benefit of making animals glow. Scientists sometimes modify cells with a gene that produces fluorescent proteins as a marker of the genetic change in cloned animals. Previously it was also done for cloned pigs, for example. In the case of the cloned cats, South Korean scientists used skin cells from a Turkish Angora cat and encoded for a coral fluorescent protein before cloning. Proponents believe that cloned animals can be useful in the study and treatment of genetic diseases, while others oppose cloning on ethical grounds.
Learn more about cloning:
The beginning of cloning studies is thought to be Hans Adolf Edward Dreisch’s demonstration in 1885 that the separation of the cells of a bicellular sea urchin results in two individual sea urchins.
In 1975, J. Derek Bromhall produced an advanced rabbit embryo by transferring the nucleus of a rabbit embryo cell into a rabbit egg cell.
In 2013, Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues produced human embryonic stem cells by fusing a skin cell and an egg cell.
