This week, Seed asks:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Answer behind the cut:
Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a developmental biologist. I didn't have any particular expectation of how cloning would develop over the last ten years, so there's nothing to compare to.
If pressed, I probably would've said something like "It's going to turn out to be a lot more complicated than this early success might seem to indicate," which would've been both accurate and unhelpful. Other than that, I really don't have an opinion.
That was easy.
Comments
# 1 | Rob Knop | July 7, 2006 5:11 PM
I was fully expecting to have braintaping capabilities together with force-growth tanks, so that we could make backup bodies into which we'd play our last-recorded braintape in the event of our deaths.
Kinda like in 1972, everybody was thinking we'd have colonies on Mars by now.
Well, OK, not really, but in the "dammit, where's my flying car" department, we really need to have clone-involved murder mysteries and entire clone armies if the true potential of human cloning is to be realized.
In the "more serious but highly narcisisstic" department, when Science Magazine had Dolly on their cover and listed it as the Discovery of the Year in 1997, they had a sidebar that listed "five projects to watch" for a possible Disc. of the Year for the next year. My group was busy patting ourselves on the back, because what we were doing -- measuring the deceleration and mass density of the Universe -- was one of those listed. And, indeed, the next year, the discovery of the *acc*eleration of the Universe did get Disc. of the Year.
-Rob "Narcissist" Knop
# 2 | Uncle Al | July 8, 2006 3:00 PM
Rsearchers were tasked with a low cost, high volume, standardized replenishment of local brothels' inventories absent outsourcing. Dolly was a Stepford wife looker! (Seemingly workable Third World alternatives fell short. There are some things even a Scot won't top - and vice-versa.)