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How Cloning Works

by Craig C. Freudenrich, Ph.D.

On Jan. 8, 2001, scientists at Advanced Cell Technology, Inc.

announced the birth of the first clone of an endangered animal,
a baby bull gaur (a large wild ox from India and southeast Asia)
named Noah. Although Noah died of an infection unrelated to
the procedure, the experiment demonstrated that it is possible to
save endangered species through cloning. Cloning is the
process of making a genetically identical organism through
nonsexual means.

Cloning has been used for many years to produce plants (even
growing a plant from a cutting is a type of cloning). Animal
cloning has been the subject of scientific experiments for years, Photo courtesy Advanced Cell Technology,
Inc.
but garnered little attention until the birth of the first cloned Noah was the first cloned
mammal in 1997, a sheep named Dolly. Since Dolly, several endangered animal
scientists have cloned other animals, including cows and mice.
The recent success in cloning animals has sparked fierce debates among scientists,
politicians and the general public about the use and morality of cloning plants, animals and
possibly humans.

In this edition of HowStuffWorks, we will examine how cloning works and possible uses of
this technology.

Send in the Clones

Nature has been cloning organisms for billions of years. For
Sexual vs. Asexual
example, when a strawberry plant sends out a runner (a form of
modified stem), a new plant (clone) grows where the runner Reproduction
takes root. Similar cloning occurs in grass (rhizomes), potatoes
Sexual reproduction involves
(tubers) and onions (bulbs). the merging of two sets of DNA
or genetic information (one from
People have been cloning plants in one way or another for the father's sperm and the other
thousands of years. For example, when you take a leaf cutting from the mother's egg) to
from a plant and grow it into a new plant (vegetative produce a new offspring that is
genetically different from either
propagation), you are cloning the original plant because the new parent. Asexual reproduction
plant has the same genetic makeup as the donor plant. (without sex) produces offspring

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Vegetative propagation works because the end of the cutting that are genetically identical to
forms a mass of non-specialized cells called a callus. With luck, the single parent organism.
the callus will grow, divide and form various specialized cells
(roots, stems), and then eventually form a new plant.

Diagram of plant cloning through tissue culture propagation

More recently, scientists have been able to clone plants by taking pieces of specialized roots,
breaking them up into root cells and growing the root cells in a nutrient-rich culture. In culture,
the specialized cells become unspecialized (dedifferentiated) into calluses. The calluses can
then be stimulated with the appropriate plant hormones to grow into new plants that are
identical to the original plant from which the root pieces were taken. This procedure, called
tissue culture propagation, has been widely used by horticulturists to grow prized orchids
and other rare flowers.

Plants are not the only organisms that can be cloned naturally. The unfertilized eggs of some
animals (small invertebrates, worms, some species of fish, lizards and frogs) can develop into

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full-grown adults under certain environmental conditions (usually a chemical stimulus of some
kind). This process is called parthenogenesis, and the offspring are clones of the females
that laid the eggs. Another example of natural cloning is identical twins. Although they are
genetically different from their parents, identical twins are naturally -occurring clones of each
other.

Gurdon's experiment to clone a frog

Scientists have experimented with animal cloning, but have never been able to stimulate a
specialized (differentiated) cell to produce a new organism directly. Instead, they rely on
transplanting the genetic information from a specialized cell into an unfertilized egg cell whose
genetic information has been destroyed or physically removed. In the 1970s, a scientist
named John Gurdon successfully cloned tadpoles. He transplanted the nucleus from a
specialized cell (skin or intestinal cell) of one frog (A) into an unfertilized egg of another frog
(B) in which the nucleus was destroyed by ultraviolet light. The egg with the transplanted
nucleus developed into a tadpole that was genetically identical to frog A. However, his
tadpoles did not survive to grow into adult frogs. His experiment showed that the process of
specialization (differentiation) in animal cells was reversible and his technique of nuclear
transfer paved the way for later cloning successes.

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Diagram of the nuclear transfer procedure that produced the

first cloned mammals

In 1997, cloning was revolutionized when Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin

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Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland successfully cloned a sheep named Dolly. Wilmut and
colleagues transplanted a nucleus from a mammary gland cell of a Finn Dorsett sheep into
the enucleated egg of a Scottish blackface ewe. The nucleus-egg combination was stimulated
with electricity to fuse the two and to stimulate cell division. The new cell divided and was
placed in the uterus of a blackface ewe to develop and Dolly was born months later. Dolly was
shown to be genetically identical to the Finn Dorsett mammary cells and not to the blackface
ewe, which clearly demonstrated that she was a successful clone (it took 276 attempts before
the experiment was successful). Dolly has since grown and reproduced several offspring of
her own through normal sexual means. Therefore, Dolly is a viable, healthy clone.

Since Dolly, several university laboratories and companies have used various modifications of
the nuclear transfer technique to produce cloned mammals, including cows, pigs, monkeys,
mice and Noah.

Why Clone?
The main reason to clone plants or animals is to mass produce organisms with desired
qualities, such as a prize-winning orchid or a genetically engineered animal (sheep have
been engineered to produce human insulin). If you had to rely on sexual reproduction
(breeding) alone to mass produce these animals, then you would run the risk of breeding out
the desired traits because sexual reproduction reshuffles the genetic deck of cards. Other
reasons for cloning might include replacing lost or deceased family pets and repopulating
endangered or even extinct species. Whatever the reasons, the new cloning technologies
have sparked many ethical debates among scientists, politicians and the general public.
Several governments have considered or enacted legislation to slow down, limit or ban
cloning experiments outright. It is clear that cloning will be a part of our lives in the future, but
the course of this technology has yet to be determined.
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Related HowStuffWorks Links

? How Human Cloning Will Work

? How Cells Work
? How Human Reproduction Works
? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
? What are genetically modified foods?
? What is a gene, and what is genetic engineering?
? Why do two children from the same parents look so different?
? How can there be seedless grapes? How can they reproduce?

Other Great Links

? British Medical Journal: Cloned Calves are Grown from Cultured Cells - Jan. 15, 2000
? Applied Genetics News: CLONING: Bringing Back Endangered Species - October 2000
? Applied Genetics News: CLONING: Pigs Cloned for the First Time - April 2000
? Discover: A Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Genetic Cloning Not Necessarily Unethical -
January 1998
? Roslin Institute Online

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? TIME.com: Dolly: An Unsettling Breakthrough

? Scientific American: Cloning for Medicine
? AgBiotech.net: Cloning
? Send in the Clones
? Human Genome Project Information: Cloning Fact Sheet
? Hello Dolly: A Webquest
? Discovery Channel School, the Science of Cloning: Classroom Activities
? Scientific American: Cloning Noah's Ark
? Advanced Cell Technology, Inc.
? University of Tennessee Cloning Project
? Australia's Thylacine: To Clone or Not to Clone?
? Infigen
? The Cloning of Dolly
? PhRMA Genomics: Cloning
? Scientific American: A Clone in Sheep's Clothing

Ethics of Cloning

? Research Defence Society (UK): Animal Cloning

? Conceiving a Clone
? Cloning: Right or Wrong?
? Ethics of Reproductive Technologies
? Cloning: Slouching Toward Creation
? Medical Ethics: Understanding Cloning
? Cloning: Are Humans Next?
? Bioethics.net: Cloning

http://www.howstuffworks.com/cloning.htm/printable 5/6/2002