60 Fun Facts About Cloning

Dolly the sheep was the first mammal cloned from what?

Earlier clones had come from embryonic cells; Dolly proved a mature, specialised cell could grow a whole new animal.

From which part of the donor sheep's body was Dolly's cell taken?

The mammary-gland origin explains the name; the donor ewe was six years old.

The first mammal cloned from an adult cell was named after which performer?

The team leader said they could not think of a more impressive pair of glands than Parton's.

Where was Dolly cloned?

The institute is part of the University of Edinburgh; PPL Therapeutics and the Ministry of Agriculture paid for the work.

In which country was Dolly born?

She lived her whole life at the institute in Midlothian, where she was bred with a Welsh Mountain ram.

What breed of sheep was Dolly?

The breed usually lives 11 to 12 years; Dolly was put down at six and a half.

In which year was Dolly born?

Her birth on 5 July was kept quiet until 22 February 1997, when the announcement made headlines worldwide.

Who led the team that cloned Dolly?

He was knighted in 2008; his colleague Keith Campbell shared the credit and the 2008 Shaw Prize with him.

How many eggs were used in the experiment that produced Dolly?

They yielded 29 viable embryos and a handful of lambs at birth, only one of which survived.

How many mothers did Dolly have?

One ewe gave the egg, another the DNA, and a third carried the embryo to term.

How many lambs did Dolly produce in her lifetime?

Bonnie came first in 1998, then twins Sally and Rosie, then triplets Lucy, Darcy and Cotton in 2000.

What condition led to Dolly being euthanised in 2003?

It was a form of lung cancer caused by a retrovirus and common in sheep kept indoors; other flock members died of it as well.

Which finding fuelled speculation that Dolly had been born genetically 'old'?

The institute said intensive health screening found no abnormalities linked to advanced ageing.

Where is Dolly's preserved body displayed?

It has been on regular exhibition in Edinburgh since 2003.

What does the abbreviation SCNT stand for?

The nucleus of a body cell goes into an egg that has had its own nucleus removed, then an electric pulse starts division.

Why are SCNT clones like Dolly not perfect genetic copies of the nucleus donor?

The donor cell's mitochondria are left behind, so the clone inherits the egg donor's mitochondrial genome.

Who coined the term 'clone' in 1903?

Horticulturists spelled it 'clon' until the early 20th century, when the final e was added to mark the long o.

The word clone derives from the Ancient Greek word for what?

It refers to growing a new plant from a cutting, the oldest form of deliberate cloning.

What is parthenogenesis?

It occurs naturally in some insects, hammerhead sharks, Cape honeybees and certain lizards.

Which large lizard is among the animals known to reproduce by parthenogenesis?

In species with XY sex determination the offspring of such virgin births are always female.

Identical twins are a natural example of cloning. How do they form?

Artificial embryo splitting copies the effect and is best done at the six- to eight-cell stage.

Which German embryologist and his student performed the first nuclear transfer in 1924?

He and Hilde Mangold used amphibian embryos; Spemann won the 1935 Nobel Prize for discovering embryonic induction.

Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned which animal in 1952?

From 104 nuclear transfers they got 35 complete embryos and 27 tadpoles.

Who cloned a frog from tadpole body cells in 1958 and shared a 2012 Nobel Prize?

He shared the prize with Shinya Yamanaka for showing that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

The world's first cloned fish, a carp, was produced in 1963 in which country?

Embryologist Tong Dizhou inserted DNA from a male carp's cell into a female carp's egg.

Who produced the first cloned mammal, from early embryonic cells, in 1984?

It was a sheep; Wilmut's Scottish institute followed with Megan and Morag from differentiated embryonic cells in 1995.

What was the name of the first cloned cat, born in December 2001?

The name stands for CopyCat or Carbon Copy; she was cloned at Texas A&M and lived to 18.

Why did the cloned cat CC look different from her calico genetic donor?

Coat patterning in calicos depends on which X chromosome is switched off in each cell, which is not copied by cloning.

Snuppy, the first cloned dog, was which breed?

He was made from an ear cell, carried by a Labrador surrogate, and named for Seoul National University plus 'puppy'.

How many surrogate mothers were used in the project that produced Snuppy?

Only two produced pups and one died of pneumonia within a month, a success rate below two tenths of a percent.

Which magazine named Snuppy its 'Most Amazing Invention' of 2005?

The Kennel Club objected that no improvement of dogs can occur if replicas are being created.

Which South Korean scientist faked his human embryonic stem cell papers?

His 2004 and 2005 papers in Science were retracted; he was dismissed from Seoul National University but Snuppy proved genuine.

Idaho Gem, the first cloned member of the horse family, was what kind of animal?

Born on 4 May 2003, he was also the first cloned sterile animal and the sibling of a champion racing mule.

Prometea, the first cloned horse, was born in 2003 in a laboratory in which country?

The Haflinger filly took 814 attempts; equestrian sport banned clones in 2007 and readmitted them in 2012.

How many attempts did it take to produce Prometea?

Horse eggs mature poorly in the lab, which is why equine cloning lagged years behind sheep and cattle.

Which was the first endangered species to be cloned, in 2001?

A cow named Bessie gave birth to the Asian gaur calf, but it died after two days.

The Pyrenean ibex is called the only animal to have gone extinct twice. Why?

The clone, made from frozen tissue of the last female, Celia, lived only a few minutes before dying of lung defects.

How did Celia, the last natural Pyrenean ibex, die in January 2000?

Her tissue was frozen in liquid nitrogen straight away in the hope of cloning her.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, born in 2017, were the first primates cloned by which method?

They were made in Shanghai from fetal cells; an earlier rhesus monkey, Tetra, had been made by splitting an embryo.

What kind of animal were Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua?

No previous SCNT monkey pregnancy had lasted more than 80 days.

Elizabeth Ann, cloned in 2020, belongs to which endangered species?

She was cloned from Willa, a female who died in the mid-1980s and left no living descendants.

Kurt, born in 2020, was the first clone of which endangered wild equine?

He was cloned from skin tissue of a stallion preserved in 1980, whose genes were missing from the surviving population.

Which company claimed in December 2002 that it had produced a cloned baby named Eve?

The firm has ties to a UFO religion; no evidence for the claim was ever produced.

Which UFO religion sees cloning as the first step to immortality?

Founder Claude Vorilhon opposed calls for a moratorium and denied the technology was inherently dangerous.

Which singer revealed that she had cloned her late dog Samantha?

The Coton de Tulear was cloned by ViaGen for a reported $50,000, producing two puppies.

Which 1931 novel features 'Bokanovsky's Process', an early fictional cloning method?

Aldous Huxley's process splits fertilised eggs in vitro into identical copies.

In The Boys from Brazil, Josef Mengele uses cloning to create copies of whom?

Ira Levin's 1976 novel was filmed in 1978.

Woody Allen's Sleeper parodies cloning with an attempt to clone a dictator from what?

The 1973 comedy is one of the earliest films to lampoon the science-fiction trope.

Which 2013 television series follows a woman who discovers she is one of many clones?

Caryl Churchill's 2002 play A Number tackled similar questions of identity through a father and his cloned sons.

Which book popularised the term 'cloning' in 1963?

Gordon Rattray Taylor's book followed renewed 1950s interest in the subject.

Which crops are named as long-standing examples of clones propagated without sex?

Some European grape cultivars are clones that have been propagated for more than two thousand years.

What is the name for making embryos to harvest stem cells rather than a whole organism?

It is also called research cloning; as of 2024 it is not in medical practice anywhere in the world.

Which company was said to have cloned about 700 dogs for their owners by 2015?

The South Korean firm was reported to be producing 500 cloned embryos a day the following year.

What did Colossal Biosciences claim to have revived in 2024 by cloning and gene editing?

The animals were grey wolf clones with 14 edited genes, and many scientists dispute that they are true dire wolves.

Which zoo's 'Frozen Zoo' stores tissue from the world's rarest species for conservation cloning?

In 2020 the zoo teamed with Revive & Restore and ViaGen to clone individuals from genetically impoverished endangered species.

Ollie, born in 2023, was the second clone of a stallion of which species, a first for endangered animals?

It marked the first time multiple living clones of one endangered individual existed at once; the surviving wild population descends from just 20 animals.

Japanese researchers demonstrated clones are not inherently short-lived by breeding how many generations of cloned mice?

The eight-year project produced healthy mice with normal lifespans, undercutting the theory that Dolly aged prematurely.

Which English playwright's 2002 play A Number pits a father against his cloned sons?

The sons are Bernard 1, Bernard 2 and Michael Black; the play was later adapted for television by the BBC and HBO Films.

In Doctor Who, the cloned warrior race the Sontarans have a weak spot called what?

Introduced in the 1973 serial The Time Warrior, the squat, bald soldiers were genetically engineered for combat.

In molecular cloning, what enzyme glues DNA fragments together in the ligation step?

Newer methods such as Gibson assembly and Golden Gate cloning skip restriction enzymes and rely on overlapping sequences instead.