Cloning the New Babes

Science comes closer to creating the perfect pig, offering hope for a larder of rejection-free organs

Dolly was once an awfully lonely sheep. When the famously cloned animal made headlines in 1997, she was the only mammal ever to be manufactured from the cell of an adult donor. Since then, the clone ranks have swelled, with mice and cattle also toddling out of the labs. Last week cloning technology took another step forward when an international biotechnology company announced that it had created a litter of five genetically identical piglets, and that it had a pretty good idea of how they could one day be used: as organ donors for ailing humans.

The idea of turning pigs...

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