Baaa Humbug?

LOUISVILLE, Ky: Don't tell Dolly, but she may have been a mistake. The Scottish scientist who cloned the world's most famous ewe more than 12 months ago now reports a "remote possibility" that he used a fetal cell to create her rather than an adult cell. What's the difference? About a year's worth of attention from the world press, since scientists have been able to "clone" animals from fetal cells for about two decades now. As Ian Wilmut of Scotland's Roslin Institute sheepishly admitted to a genetics forum at the University of Louisville, fetal cells might have been present in the circulatory sytem of Dolly's clone mother during the time he took his now-famous 277 genetic samples. "We and everybody else had completely overlooked it," he said, tacitly admitting that a couple of naysayers writing in Science magazine last month may have a point.

Which could mean that Dolly, who was named after country star Dolly Parton for the mammary glands she was supposedly extracted from, is a living lie. If this is the case -- and tests are being conducted as we speak -- she will lose her status as world's first cloned mammal to a pair of monkeys in Oregon. Poor lamb.