Tall, Slender, Straight and Intelligent
Philip Kitcher
- Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead by Gina Kolata
Allen Lane, 218 pp, £15.99, November 1997, ISBN 0 7139 9221 2 - Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World by Lee Silver
Weidenfeld, 315 pp, £20.00, January 1998, ISBN 0 297 84135 1
From the late seventies to the mid-Nineties, biological orthodoxy insisted that the artificial production of animals with an identical complement of nuclear genes – clones, in the vernacular – could only be achieved by means of the transfer of nuclei from embryonic cells, and then only in non-mammalian species. There were excellent grounds for insisting on the impossibility of cloning from adult cells. For, although virtually all the cells in a mature animal contain the same complement of genes, cellular differentiation, the process by which the cells of different systems and tissues take on their distinctive properties, modifies the nuclear DNA in such a way that some regions are effectively silenced. In consequence, nuclei from adult cells were not supposed to be able to direct normal embryonic growth – which accounted for the disappointing results of transplantation experiments using adult nuclei, i.e. the deaths of embryos at early stages.
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