The Sheep From Brazil

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NEW YORK: An unsettling bit of science fiction crossed over into reality Monday morning in the form of Dolly, an embraceable ewe with an incredible past: She was an exact genetic copy of another lamb. News of the first-ever cloning of a mammal sent stock in the small Scottish biotech company responsible soaring as investors drooled (whole herds of the same prizewinning cow!) over the possibilities. More cautious types pointed out that this procedure could presumably, uh, be used to make copies of humans, which opens up an extremely large ethical can of worms. Ian Wilmut, one of the scientists involved in the project, said it would be unethical to even try. "There is no clinical reason why you would do this. Why would you make another human being? We think it would be ethically unacceptable, and certainly would not want to be involved in the project." Meanwhile, President Clinton provided a typically Beltway response: He asked for a commission to review the implications. Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslyn Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, will publish a report on the sheep cloning Thursday in the journal Nature. Previously, scientists had cloned less complex life forms, like tadpoles, but the tadpoles had never developed into frogs. In the sheep experiment, tissue was taken from the ewe's udder and cultivated in a lab, using a process that rendered the cells essentially dormant. They also took unfertilized sheep eggs, removed the nucleus, and then fused them with cells from the udder. The eggs, now equipped with a nucleus, grew into embryos as though they'd been fertilized. The embryos were then implanted in ewes to develop. With only one of the 277 fused eggs yielding a lamb, the process is currently highly inefficient, says Wilmut, but he expects it to improve. Which is just what ethicists are worried about.