Exactly Like Papa

• No-cloning zones: The countries that oppose all forms of cloning include Australia, Germany, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United States, Uzbekistan, Zambia. Australia is reviewing its stand on therapeutic cloning. Many scientists in the US too feel that with a new democratic president in place, the blanket ban on cloning might be reviewed.
  
• Controlled cloners: Countries that ban reproductive cloning but are in favour of controlled therapeutic cloning include Canada, China, Cuba, France, Iceland, India, Jamaica, Japan, Singapore, Spain and the UK.

***

Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from adult DNA, was put down by lethal injection on Feb 14, 2003, six years after she was created out of a Scottish Blackface mama and a Finn Dorset father. Dolly had been suffering from crippling arthritis and lung cancer at the time of her death. The ewe Dolly had been cloned out of had died several years earlier. It took 276 attempts before a surrogate mama could produce Dolly. And though she was born out of a Blackface, Dolly herself was white-faced, after daddy. She was also mother to six lambs, bred the old-fashioned way.

***

Experiments in cloning have come to India. They involve creating an organism genetically identical to another organism, or a cell genetically identical to another cell. There are broadly two kinds of cloning, reproductive and therapeutic. Both are done through a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

Click here for large image

A test-tube baby is created through the process of in-vitro fertilisation wherein an egg is fertilised outside the body with sperm from a donor and then implanted in the uterus of the biological or surrogate mother.