Ask A ScienceBlogger: On How Cloning Went

On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?

Yes and no.

Yes, cloning has developed the way I thought it would in terms of it continuing to develop. There was much ado in our culture about whether we should have cloning at all and if so what kind. All the fuss always struck me as somewhat self-defeating considering how tremendously difficult it is to clone anything. When you can clone a complex animal without 80 tries come back and talk to me about the issues. We need to know so much more before we can speculate about the implications.

No, in the sense that we know a lot more about how the cells that become clones (through somatic cell transfer) and embryonic stem cells work. I think the science itself in that regard has been very surprising. For example, did you know that the embryonic stem cell state itself has its own transcription factors -- like Nanog, Sox2, and Oct4? The popular impression of an embryonic stem cell is that it is a blank cell -- that it has no transcription factors that define it. This is not the case. Rather the science -- as in papers like this -- has shown that the embryonic stem cell operates in its own discrete developmental niche.

Cloning has gone the way I thought it would in the sense that we know much more about it than we did then. Research into the area of cloning has not been stifled but public disapproval. The facts that we have found about how it works, however, were not what I would have expected.