First cloned mammal in history

When the film The Boys From Brazil was first released in 1978 it was described not just as a thriller but also science fiction. Gregory Peck played the part of Joseph Mengele, the chief doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp, and Laurence Olivier played Ezra Lieberman, the famous hunter of Nazi war criminals.

A young Nazi hunter stumbles across a group of former SS officers in Paraguay and he reports the matter to Lieberman. He does not place any great importance in it until the young man is killed. Lieberman investigates and discovers that the families of almost 100 14-year-old boys consist of mothers who are 42 and fathers who are 65.
The science fiction part comes from the fact that all the children are identical. It transpires that Mengele has succeeded in implanting samples of Hitler’s DNA into each of the mothers in an attempt to recreate Hitler. The fathers are killed in an effort to recreate family circumstances exactly similar to that of Hitler’s childhood. The very idea of successfully cloning human living beings was indeed science fiction as little as 30 years ago.
Cloning has been part of nature in that the ability of certain species to reproduce themselves could be called cloning. Similarly, plant grafting could be called cloning because a new plant is produced by a means other than from seed.
It was inevitable that scientists would attempt to clone living animals. Cows, cats, dogs, water buffalos, horses and camels have been cloned. The first large animal to be successfully cloned was a sheep.
Scientists in Scotland under the direction of Dr Ian Wilmut inserted cells from the uterus of a pregnant six-year-old sheep into another sheep and allowed it to develop.
The resultant sheep, the first cloned mammal in history, was born in July 1996. Dolly, as she was called, had the identical DNA as her source. The process was not hugely efficient as she was the only lamb to live to adulthood out of almost 300 attempts.
Dolly was a Finn Dorset sheep and she lived her entire life at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. For security reasons, she was always kept indoors. Her first lamb was named Bonnie. The following year she produced twins and the next triplets. These were called Sally, Rosie, Lucy, Darcy and Cotton.
At the age of five, Dolly began to show signs of severe arthritis. She deteriorated so much that she was put down in February 2003 when only six years of age. The normal life expectancy of a Finn Dorset sheep should be around 11 or 12, so Dolly definitely did not live her full span. This may have been as a result of having spent all her life indoors but some speculate that, since she was cloned from a six-year-old sheep, then she could have actually been born with a genetic age of six. This would have explained her rapid ageing.
As well as being an historic milestone, her name has sometimes been used in a derogatory manner to describe somebody who is exactly like his or her parents.
Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal in history, was presented to the world for the first time on February 23, 1997 – 24 years ago this week.