The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control

Human cloning has grabbed people's imagination, but that is merely a diversion--and one we personally regret and find distasteful. We did not make Dolly for that ... Our work completes the biotechnological trio: genetic engineering, genomics, cloning. It also provides an extraordinarily powerful scientific model for studying the interactions of the genes and their surroundings--interactions that account for so much of development and disease. Taken together, the new biotechnologies and the pending scientific insights will be immensely powerful. Truly they will take humanity into the age of biological control.

The cloning of Dolly in 1996 from the cell of an adult sheep was a pivotal moment in history. For the first time, a team of scientists, Led by Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, was able to clone a whole mammal using a single cultured adult body cell, a breakthrough that revolutionized three technologies and brought science ever closer to the possibility of human cloning.

In this definitive account, the scientists who accomplished this stunning feat explain their hypotheses and experiments, their conclusions, and the implications of their work. Researchers have already incorporated into sheep the gene for human factor IX, a blood-clotting protein used to treat hemophilia. In the future, cultures of mammary cells may prove to be valuable donor material, and genetically modified animal organs may be transplanted into humans. Normal pig organs, for example, are rapidly destroyed by the human immune system, but if altered genetically, they could alleviate the serious shortage of available organs. Genetically engineered sheep are also expected to be valuable as models for genetic defects that mimic human disorders such as cystic fibrosis, and for cell-based therapies for diseases--such as Parkinson's, diabetes, and muscular dystrophy--that lack universally dependable treatments.

But what are the ethical issues raised by this pioneering research, and how are we to reconcile them with the enormous possibilities? Written with award-winning science writer Colin Tudge, The Second Creation is a Landmark work that details the most exciting and challenging scientific discovery of the twentieth century--with the furthest-reaching ramifications for the twenty-first.