By Emma Young
The world’s first cloned baby was born on 26 December, claims the Bahamas-based cloning company Clonaid. But there has been no independent confirmation of the claim.
The girl, named Eve by the cloning team, was said to have been born by Caesarean section at 1155 EST. The birth at an undisclosed location went “very well”, said Brigitte Boisselier, president of Clonaid. The company was formed in 1997 by the Raelian cult, which believes people are clones of aliens.
“The baby is very healthy. She is doing fine,” Roisselier told a press conference in Hollywood, Florida, on Friday. The seven-pound baby is a clone of a 31-year-old American woman, whose partner is infertile, she said.
Proving that the baby is a clone of another person would be possible by showing that their DNA is identical. Genetic tests on the baby and “mother” will now be carried out and the results will be available “in eight or nine days”, Boisselier said.
She told reporters: “You can still go back to your office and treat me as a fraud. You have one week to do that.” Boisselier added that Michael Guillen, science editor at ABC News and a former Harvard University mathematician, will carry out the genetic tests.
Necessary expertise
Many scientists are sceptical of Boisselier’s claim. Alan Trounson of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says he does not believe the group has the necessary expertise to clone a person. “And nearly everything they have said in the past has never been confirmed by scientific investigation,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Maverick fertility scientist Severino Antinori, who claimed earlier in December that the first cloned baby would be born in January 2003, is also critical. “An announcement of this type has no scientific corroboration and risks creating confusion,” he said. “We keep up our scientific work without making announcements. I don’t take part in this … race.”
Opponents of human cloning point to the high rate of miscarriages of cloned animal fetuses, and the high rate of defects in live births. Boisselier has claimed that the large number of female cult members willing to act as surrogate mothers increased their chances of success.
“Irresponsible and repugnant”
Attempting to clone humans is “irresponsible and repugnant and ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence from seven mammalian species cloned so far,” Rudolph Jaenisch, a cloning expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told New Scientist previously.
In May, US-based fertility scientist Panos Zavos told the US Congress that five groups of scientists were rushing to be the first to produce the first cloned human baby.
Reproductive cloning – creating a baby rather than a cloned early embryo – is illegal in many countries. But in November, talks on a global ban were suspended, following a series of deadlocked United Nations meetings.
Fifteen years ago a sheep called Dolly arrived into our world and caused a sensation. A living, breathing (and bleating) sheep created from an adult cell, Dolly was not the first animal to be cloned, but she became the most famous. After Dolly’s birth, many scientists predicted flocks of all types of cloned species were now possible – as well as raising the controversial possibility that humans could be cloned one day. BBC Future looks back at some of the landmark achievements and celebrated births over the decades. Everyone knows Dolly, but less known is that the first cloned animal success was a tadpole in the 1950s. Explore the graphic in detail Bubbles around each animal correspond to the “buzz” that each cloning milestone has had on the field. To gauge the level of buzz, we turned to Google Scholar, which indexes the world's scientific literature across a whole range of disciplines. The data for each bubble came from tracking citations of different combinations of relevant terms (e.g. “cloning” and “human stem cells”). Despite several successes, such as cows and mice, the timeline shows that he cloned zoo isn’t filled with as many species as perhaps scientists had hoped. Some successes were brief, with animals dying days after they were born. And some efforts that showed early promise in the lab have yet to result in a successful birth. But cloning efforts have been boosted over the last 5-10 years thanks to huge improvements in tools and technologies. With these improvements, scientists still dream of a world where endangered animals can be saved from extinction, and where extinct animals can be miraculously brought back to life. So, will we see mammoths roaming the planet again? Who knows. Have a look and if you think we have missed anything let us know on our Twitter or our Facebook page. And if you want to check out the data we used to create the graphic, you can find it here.
Twenty-five years ago today, a sheep named Dolly became the first animal to be cloned, using an adult somatic cell.
The Dolly experiment blew up in the news across the globe. It changed the world of stem cell research ― and on a more personal level, kept the institute that hosted the experiment alive.
"From a personal point of view, one of the most important things that came from Dolly was the survival of the research institute that I work in," Alan Archibald, who was part of the 1996 experiment facilitated by the UK's Roslin Institute, told DW with a laugh.
"We were facing government cuts. And the money we made by selling the intellectual property to Dolly kept us going until we found alternative sources of money."
Dolly was cloned using a cell taken from another sheep's mammary gland. She was born in July 1996 with a white face ― a clear sign she'd been cloned, because if she'd been related to her surrogate mother, she'd have had a black face.
Researchers named her Dolly after Dolly Parton, who is known for her large "mammary glands" ― breasts.
Dolly was the only baby sheep to be born live out of a total of 277 cloned embryos.
She gave birth to six babies and died of lung disease at the age of six.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Dolly - the one who started it all
This woolly miracle started out in a test tube and was born on July 5, 1996, to three mothers - one provided the egg, the second the DNA and the third was the surrogate. Dolly was the world's first mammal cloned from an adult cell. The sheep that made history lived to be six, when she was put down after developing a lung disease. Dolly is on display at Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Half horse, half donkey
Idaho Gem is the very first cloned mule. Born in 2003 in - you guessed it - a town in Idaho, he is an identical genetic copy of his champion racing mule brother. Idaho Gem lived up to expectations and became a successful racing mule. Tougher and more productive than horses, mules are a - usually sterile - cross between a female horse and a male donkey.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
CC cat
The world's first cloned pet was a cat. The Texas scientists who created the clone in 2001 called the furball CC, for carbon copy. Commercial pet cloning hasn't taken off, however, much to the dismay of devoted pet owners.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Five sisters
Noel, Angel, Star, Joy and Mary were born on Christmas Day 2001 at PPL Therapeutics - which is the company that helped make Dolly the sheep: The five healthy female piglet clones, PPL said, had the genetic capability to allow their organs to be transferred to the human body without being rejected.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Desert beauty
Injaz ("Achievement") is the first cloned female dromedary, that is one-hump, camel. The gangly Arabian camel was born in 2009 at the Camel Reproduction Center in Dubai. Used for transport, riding and racing, camels still play an important role today in the Persian Gulf society.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Join the fray
Spanish scientists cloned a fighting bull they named Got. In this 2010 photo, the little fellow, cloned from the tough fighting bull Vasito, doesn't look ferocious yet at all. Got's mom was a serene black and white milk cow surrogate.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Monkey biology
Unlike Dolly, who was created using a procedure called nuclear transfer, little Tetra the rhesus macaque was created through a technique called embryo splitting. In 2000, scientists in Oregon presented the little primate they had successfully cloned for the first time. Above, Tetra, which means four in Greek, is four months old.
Animal clones: Dolly, Mini-Winnie and Co.
Fido forever?
A team of researchers in South Korea managed to clone the first canine in 2005: the Afghan hound Snuppy. In 2014, a biotech company based in Seoul cloned another dog, this one from a 12-year-old dachshund that belongs to a caterer in London who won the procedure in a competition. The result: Mini-Winnie. Experts, however, warn of cloning pets, arguing the animals won't necessarily be the same.
"It changed the scientific world's view about how flexible [cell] development was," said Archibald. "There was a view that once a fertilized egg had developed into a multicellular animal, into liver cells and blood cells and brain cells, for those…cells, that was it, it was a dead end. There was no way back to alternative places for those cells to be. So the reprogramming that was critical to the Dolly experiment stood long-standing scientific dogma on its head."
Dolly's cloning helped lead to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of iPS cells by a team led by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka.
This is likely the most important development in stem cell research to result from Dolly's cloning, Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge, who heads the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told DW.
IPS cells offer a way to model human disease and are currently being used in biological research about premature aging, cancer and heart disease.
Additionally, Archibald said the genetically modified heart that was used in the world's first pig-to-human heart transplant procedure in January was created using Dolly's technology.
Cloning of humans
Although a human embryo was successfully cloned in 2013, there's been no progress made so far to clone an entire human being.
But monkeys have been replicated: in China, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua became the first primates to be cloned using the Dolly technique in January 2018.
Out of nearly 150 cloned embryos, the monkeys' surrogate mothers were the only ones to deliver live babies.
Some progress has also been made to clone animals on the verge of extinction. US researchers successfully cloned the black footed ferret in 2021 and the endangered Przewalski's horse in 2020.
Efforts are currently underway to clone the wooly mammoth, the giant panda and the northern white rhino.
Dolly's body is now on display at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh
Along with cell-cloning's ability to study diseases, animal cloning allows major industry farms to produce more food.
The US Food and Drug Administration allows the cloning of cattle, pigs and goats and their offspring for the production of meat and milk. In 2008, the agency said the food is as safe as food derived from non-cloned animals ― and thus doesn't need to be labeled.
It's unclear how much meat and milk derived from cloned animals is sold in US markets.
The practice isn't allowed in Europe ― in 2015, the European Parliament voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals.
But that doesn't mean lab experiments aren't being facilitated on EU grounds, said Lovell-Badge.
"The field where the cloning procedures are actively being pursued (including in Germany) is for agricultural animals as a way to help generate or propagate pigs or cattle with valuable genetic characteristics," he told DW.
For example, he said, cells from an animal could be edited by scientists. Then the cloning methods could be used to derive animals carrying the new genetic trait, such as disease resistance, or to make them more suitable as organ donors for humans.
A small industry has been created around the cloning of pets. Examples include the company ViaGen in the US, Sinogene in China, and Sooam Biotech in South Korea.
Snuppy the dog was cloned in 2005 in South Korea, Garlic the cat in July 2019 in China, and US singer Barbra Streisand's Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett after her dog Samantha died in 2017.
"The justification for doing this is to ‘replace a lost much-loved pet'," said Lovell-Badge. "However, this is nonsense."
He said that although it's true that the cloned animal will essentially have the same genomic DNA as the original pet, animals "aren't simply a product of [their] DNA."
Even if the cloning is successful, an animal's nature is partly determined by its genes, but also by its environment, which means a clone will never be the exact same as the original animal, he said.
Dolly's cloning accelerated stem cell research
Archibald added that although cloning technology is more efficient now than when Dolly was made, the process is still pretty inefficient.
"You would need a lot of female individuals to lay the eggs that would be used in the process," he said.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker