Every day scientists work towards new discoveries. The world and technology are vast and constantly changing, meaning scientists must stay on their A-game to keep up. Someone had to discover the moon for the moonwalk to have happened. Someone had to discover that our world is made up of atoms and molecules, and that matter is all around us. Today we will be looking into a scientific discovery that's more with modern times.
Animal cloning isn't something one might hear often, or even at all. On July 5, 1995, the first-ever successful cloned mammal was discovered. Dolly the Sheep would live on till 2003, having a successful and most certainly famous life. From the mammary gland and egg cells of others, scientists were able to extract the cells and use them towards Dolly. (Institution, R. (n.d.))
Animal cloning was happening at the time so what makes Dolly so special? Well, considering she lives on for many years is incredible itself, yet it is the cells from which she came that make her so special. At the time it was deemed impossible to clone an animal from adult cells. Dolly proved everyone wrong. Dolly the Sheep, some saw as just a calf was created from the cells of a fully-grown adult sheep.
What exactly did the cloning process look like? After the scientist had taken the cells from the two adult sheep, they used electrical pulses to bind the cells together. When the fusion process was over, the cell began to divide, obeying the natural laws of reproduction. This process was with the unfertilized egg. Copults were then fused together and the embryo of Dolly was created. She went through the normal gestation period for sheep, being born nearly 113 days later (Encyclopedia Britannica).
With the first discovery of Dolly, in attempts or replication, the discovery of induced Pluripotent Stem occurred, iPS for short. In a short term, iPS are adult cells that are genetically modified in a pluripotent state. One may often hear of them being used in medical drug discoveries, and even being used for disease modeling. Knowing of these new cells, scientists have tried to replicate animals like Dolly, such as chickens, as a way to figure out how to end diseases common in animals. For example the bird flu, scientists have been closer to cures knowing they have the option of animal cloning.
With the full discovery that animals can be successfully cloned, thanks to Dolly the Sheep, the world of science has changed. Just one discovery led to so many developments in the science field, spanning from other cloned animals to genetically modified cells. Dolly would go on to become a global sensation two years after her official birth. She, unfortunately, passed away in 2003, living a healthy life. Thank you to Dolly who changed the world of cloning science.
About The Author
JayLynn is an involved student, being sophomore class president last year. She works part time as a waitress but doesn’t let work get in the way of her true dedication, school. She chooses to keep journalism more as a hobby later in life, but never plans to shy away from it.
Sources
(Fridovich-Keil, J. L. (2022, September 26). Dolly. Encyclopedia Britannica.https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dolly-cloned-sheep)
Institution, R. (n.d.). The life of dolly. Dolly the Sheep. Retrieved November 3, 2022, from https://dolly.roslin.ed.ac.uk/facts/the-life-of-dolly/index.html#:~:text=Why%20was%20Dolly%20so%20important,the%20animal%20they%20came%20from.
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