Cloning

Cloning is the process of creating an identical copy of something. In biology, it collectively refers to processes used to create copies of DNA fragments (molecular cloning), cells (cell cloning), or organisms.

Dolly the Sheep

Dolly was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and lived there until her death when she was six.

Dolly was publically significant because the effort showed that the genetic material from a specific adult cell could be reprogrammed to grow an entire new organism. Before this demonstration, there was no proof for the widely spread hypothesis that differentiated animal cells can give rise to entire new organisms.