This year marks the 25th anniversary of a scientific milestone: the birth of Dolly the Sheep at Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
At the time, there were fears that the breakthrough would open the floodgates to a Brave New World scenario of cloned human beings. The nightmare was of a future in which certain individuals would be picked out on the basis of intelligence, looks or some other attribute — and then endlessly replicated.
But as far as we know that’s never happened. The first primates (a pair of crab-eating macaques) were cloned in 2017, but from embryonic, not adult, cells.
