PARIS: Ten years ago on Wednesday, a lamb was born in Scotland and the world hasn’t been quite the same ever since.
Dolly splashed headlines as the globe’s first cloned mammal, triggering a storm of dreams, dread and ethical polemic that has never abated.
From this event has flowed a river of money, directed into the quest for cures for cancer, heart degeneration, Alzheimer’s and other crippling disease.
And there have likewise been anguished debate, bitter opposition and the crafting of laws and guidelines to restrict or shape cloning research.
The technique that led to Dolly is called somatic cell nuclear transfer and has remained essentially unchanged over the decade.
A mammalian egg is taken, and its nucleus is removed.
The nucleus is replaced through a microscopic glass tube by the nucleus of a cell from the animal to be cloned.
The reconstructed egg is then treated with a jolt of electricity and placed in a dish of nurturing chemicals to make it divide, until a few days later it becomes a cluster of cells big enough to be transplanted into the surrogate mother’s uterus.
Dolly, created at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, was named after Dolly Parton, the big-busted country and western singer, because the cell that was cloned came from a sheep’s mammary gland.
But the miscarriage rate of transplanted eggs is extremely high, and of those embryos that make it to term, many have deformities or die prematurely: a clear warning to any scientist mad or foolish enough to try to make a cloned baby.
So if cloning is costly and potentially risky, why bother with it? The most alluring reason is medical.
A cloned lab animal can provide a very useful standardised tool for experiment. And a farm animal that can be engineered and cloned to produce rare pharmaceutical proteins in its milk could help save lives and ease suffering.
But the most glittering prize of all is to harness cloning to embryonic stem cells, the primitive master cells of early-stage embryos that famously have the power to develop into almost any tissue of the body.
Researchers believe embryonic stemcells can some day be coaxed into regenerative tissue that could repair brain cells, nerves, kidneys, livers and other organs damaged by disease.
But here comes the ethical firestorm. Some religious groups already oppose the use of human embryonic cells, saying that this tissue has the same value as a life.
Yet there is an added queasiness about human cloning that is shared by many others — even if the immediate goal is therapeutic and nothing is created beyond a tiny cluster of cells, a further step will have been taken towards baby cloning.
