The experiment, of course, is cloning. When biologists in Scotland took one mammary cell from an adult ewe, put it into a sheep ovum and got the ovum to divide and mature into a lamb they named Dolly, they produced a genetic copy of the ewe. It was the first time a mammal had been cloned from a grown animal. Would humans be next? Eminent scientists had said they couldn’t and wouldn’t clone people. But as the year ends, fertility clinics are manipulating human ova with techniques identical to those for cloning. Other labs are close to cloning monkeys. Last February, when Dolly click-clacked onto the world stage, the science journal Nature predicted that a human would be cloned in one to 10 years. Then, that looked rash. Today, it looks conservative.
