In 1997 the world was astonished by news coming out of Scotland suggesting not only that everybody could be cloned, but that whole armies could be made of clones. Or that you could be cloned without your knowing it. Or that you could clone yourself as many times as you wanted in order to have an endless supply of human spare parts, which will keep you young and healthy for ever. As you already know it, the news were about the cloning of Dolly carried out by Ian Wilmut and coworkers at the Roslin Institute.
Now, if scientists had been cloning animals since the 1950´s, what was the big deal about Dolly? Well, up to that moment all cloning had been done using fetal cells, which, in the case of humans, could not be experimented upon, and Dolly was cloned starting with an adult cell. Thus, in principle, the need for fetal cells was bypassed and all of the above-mentioned suggestions were made possible, which lit a fire worldwide and prompted the US, the European Community and many other governments to prohibit the cloning of human beings with reproductive purposes. The fire was stirred by an, at that time, unemployed 76 years old man, with no experience whatsoever in the area of animal cloning, Richard Seed, who said that he will clone human beings starting with himself. Ever since that moment the idea of cloning a human being is hanging in the air.
Thus, we have to answer the question: Is it possible to successfully clone a human being?
First let´s review how Dolly was cloned. The used the process known as nuclear transfer. They took a cell from the mammary gland of a white-faced lamb and extracted its nucleus, that is, they isolated the genome of this lamb. Afterwards they took an ovule from a black-faced lamb and also extracted its nucleus. Then they put both the nucleus from the white-faced lamb and the enucleated cell (the cell without nucleus) from the black-faced lamb in a tissue culture medium and zap! Fused them with an electric pulse. This fusion made the ovule behave as if it was fecundated. After the cells had divided a few times in the lab, they were implanted in the uterus of another black-faced lamb (that is, they in vitro fertilized it). After a few months Dolly (white-faced) was born and the news created the already mentioned havoc around the world. It is important for you to know that to this day nobody understands what exactly, in biological terms, the electric pulse does.
