Thursday 22 February 2024

Today Is...Dolly The Sheep Cloned

When Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned today in 1997, it was assumed that we were on the very cusp of a brave new world where sci-fi melted into real-life where humans and extinct animals could be copied with ease but it does seem to have fallen out of the public consciousness since.
Not that no science hasn't continued with it, in early 2000, a tree landed on the last living Pyrenean ibex, turning that creature into just one more statistic on an ever-growing list of extinct species but then, in 2009, a goat gave birth to a cloned Pyrenean ibex which marked the first time any species had been brought back from extinction and also the first species to become extinct twice when it died seven minutes later.
The precedent was set though and now we know that we could bring animals back to life but human cloning is still a bridge too far ethically to even seriously consider and some places have already made their decision on it, banning human cloning entirely, just in case somebody happens to figure it out, somewhere where ethics are not so near the top of the agenda.
From sheep to ibex is the start, but as soon as primates, which share almost all of our DNA, are cloned then it is only a small step to humans and the Chinese successfully created two cloned monkeys from a non-embryonic cell in 2018 making it technically possible to clone human beings.

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