Word: wakayama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Whatever the reason, the cloned mice were perfectly normal in all respects. They could mate and give birth, and their DNA was so robust that they themselves could be cloned--and their clones cloned. So far, Wakayama and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii have produced three generations of identical mice...
...technique was almost identical to Wilmut's except for two key steps. First, instead of using electric shocks to coax an adult cell into merging with a host egg whose nucleus had been removed, Wakayama injected just the adult nucleus into a nucleus-free host. And second, he let the hybrid cell sit for up to six hours before stimulating it to start dividing...
...must have done something right. Where Wilmut got only a single cell to flower into an embryo and then a full-term fetus, Wakayama got dozens; up to 3% of his clones survived. That may be in part because his technique treated the cells more gently. It's also possible that injecting just the nucleus introduced fewer contaminants into the host cell...
...such well understood genetics and reproduces so rapidly (up to five generations in a year) means that scientists will be able to study in detail the process by which genes turn on and turn off, and thus how cells become specialized for particular jobs in the body. And if Wakayama's technique can be scaled up to larger animals--a question researchers are already making plans to answer--the research could lead to all sorts of applications...
...Wakayama's work does bring complete human cloning a dramatic step closer to reality. Creating a carbon copy of a living adult will always be impossible, however. The difference in age between parent and child alone would prevent it, and because genetics only partly determines who we are, a clone could never be exactly the same person as its parent. The offspring of a brilliant musician or a scientific genius could, depending on his or her life experience, turn out to be a great criminal. But human cloning will happen anyway--perhaps much sooner than anyone thought. And when...