Enlarge / A male Argal sheep in the wild. (credit: Getty Images)
Readers of a certain age may remember Dolly, a Finn-Dorset sheep, born in 1996 to three mothers and some proud Scottish scientists. Dolly made headlines worldwide just by being alive, as she was the first mammal to be cloned using DNA from somatic cells.
In this form of cloning, a body cell supplies the entire DNA of the cloned animal, which is then injected into an unfertilized egg from which the existing genetic material has been removed. Zap the egg with a little electricity, implant it in a surrogate mother's uterus, wait a few months, and bam-out pops Dolly.
The process proved that the magic of embryonic development wasn't just hidden in eggs and sperm; even somatic cells from adult animals were capable of reproducing the entire being and generating every cell needed by the developing embryo.
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