The success of Dolly brought a flurry of media attention to cloning - both its potential benefits and the world's fears. Related: 20 years after Dolly the sheep, what have we learned about cloning? Other reports suggest issues with premature aging, increased birth size and immune system issues. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, sheep and other cloned mammals have had various organ defects, including the heart, brain and liver. In those early years, cloned embryos faced many failures, and the animals born alive sometimes died prematurely. To create Dolly, researchers needed to clone 277 embryos, 29 of those were healthy enough to implant, but only one survived until birth. While not the first cloned mammal, Dolly was the first created from an adult cell, rather than an embryonic or fetal cell. The most well-known animal clone is Dolly the sheep, created in 1996 at the University of Edinburgh. It has been more than a quarter of a century since researchers first cloned animals from adult cells. For example, it can create large amounts of proteins for medications like insulin or be used to detect the presence of specific strands of DNA, like in the COVID-19 PCR test. Related: Rare 'virgin birth' of shark in Italian aquarium could be first of its kindĬloning is also very real in the biology lab - researchers worldwide use gene cloning in many ways. In humans, every cell in the body is a clone of the first embryo cell created when the father's sperm fertilized the mother's egg, and identical twins are natural clones. Similarly, parthenogenesis is a unique biological phenomenon that results in the spontaneous creation of natural clones - it happens in some species of sharks, amphibians, lizards and snakes. For example, bacteria can reproduce asexually, essentially cloning themselves all the time. Some types of cloning occur in nature regularly. Yes, cloning is real, but it may not look like it does in science fiction stories. 'In our research lab … we can develop into different kinds of cells in the body such as neurons or cardiovascular cells.' Is cloning real? 'Therapeutic cloning refers to the use of embryonic stem cells that in our lab we derive from somatic cells from a patient's skin,' Shoukhrat Mitalipov, an embryologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, told LiveScience in an email. And perhaps the most medically applicable type of cloning for humans is therapeutic cloning, which creates cloned embryonic stem cells of a patient to create genetically identical cells that can treat a medical condition.

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