On July 5, 1996, after 276 failed attempts, a team of scientists at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh achieved something remarkable:Theymanaged to clone a sheep.

After seeing her, the media went wild, quickly incitinghysteria about what would come next. If scientists knew how to clone a sheep, how soon would it be before they started cloning humans?

Over the last two decades, a number of different animals have been cloned in the same waycows, horses, cats, dogs, pigs. Despite the success in cloning various mammals through nuclear transfer, cloning is still very difficult to pull off. The process is prone to introducing genetic errors, which results in many cloned offspring dying young.

These days, Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, said no one is really researching reproductive cloning for humans. Its simply too inefficient and error prone to make it worthwhile.Some researchers have suggested cloning technology could be used to rebirth lost children or prevent disease, but Charo said no one has filed an application with the Food and Drug Administration to get started onthis kind of research.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:Twenty Years After Dolly the Sheep, Were No Closer to Cloning Humans

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20 years after Dolly the sheep, human cloning is no closer - Genetic Literacy Project