The Clone Named Dolly

This week’s Retro Report video tells the story of Dolly the sheep, the first clone of an adult mammal. The Scottish scientists who created her recall the painstaking process of trying to get the experiment to work. After hundreds of tries, they successfully took a cell from an adult sheep, fused it to another sheep’s unfertilized egg and implanted the resulting embryo in a surrogate mother. But Dolly’s birth, and the rush of media attention that followed when the news broke in 1997, gave way almost instantaneously to fears and speculation about what this discovery meant for humanity’s ability to manipulate biology. The debate only intensified in 1998, when an American scientist isolated human embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any type of cell in the body, raising the hope of a new field of regenerative medicine. Here, one of the science reporters who covered the debate for The Times offers a rearview commentary.

Some events are just too emotive to be seen clearly until long after the dust has settled. The cloning of Dolly the sheep created a...