Because we didn't have enough sheep already...

On July 5, 1996, I was eating a flaming watermelon. Well...not really. It was my brother's eighth birthday, and since he "doesn't like cake" for unknown reasons, we settled on a treat that required minimal effort as far as preparations go (the wax from the candles comes right off). In the height of our sibling rivalry, I wish I had been culturally aware enough to tell him that I was not celebrating his birthday with my enthusiastic watermelon consumption. It was, in fact, a much more important day (and certainly deserving of a slightly richer dessert).

Halfway across the world, in Edinburgh, other people were celebrating a birthday (dancing around in kilts and playing bagpipes, surely). The first cloned mammal, Dolly, had been born! Dolly was a sheep, cloned from a somatic cell of another sheep (quite predictably, also Dolly). It was a cell from a mammary gland, actually, which is why the Scottish people named her Dolly (as in "Dolly Parton sure has giant mammary gland cells!"). Apparently Pamela Anderson hadn't made it into Scottish pop culture yet and they were still listening to music from the late 60s. But you sure can see the resemblance - check it out:



Just kidding. I think.

Anyway, they cloned Dolly by taking the nucleus from the donor cell and implanting it into an unfertilized egg cell (sans its original nucleus). Then they stimulated that cell to divide with an electric shock, and eventually implanted it into a surrogate sheep uterus. Apparently this is a tough process to get right: Dolly was the only survivor of 227 cloning attempts. Oops. The guy whose brainchild (brainlamb?) this was has said that the process will probably never be efficient enough for use in humans. So sad; I was desperately hoping this was an actual possibility.

Dolly lived for six fulfilling years, during which she made six more baby sheep. Her breed is supposed to live for 12 years, but since she was living an extra life, six years of deja vu was probably plenty for her.

After Dolly, a dog named Snuppy (really...?) was successfully cloned in Korea. If dogs and sheep ever become endangered, we'll be able to bring them back, no problem. It's too bad that no one decided to put any serious effort towards cloning a more exciting animal, like a spider monkey or a tasmanian devil. Taxpayers would probably be a little more into the whole cloning thing if we all got to keep genetically identical (and possibly buxom) baby monkeys named Lindsay Lohan or Tara Reid.

And in case you were wondering, that sheep picture is actually Dolly. Her remains are on display at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where she spent her whole second life. At least that's where her exterior remains are. Her insides? Probably haggis.