SCIENTISTS CLAIM FIRST CLONE OF ADULT ANIMAL IN BRITAIN

February 24, 1997

LONDON (Reuters) -- British scientists said on Sunday they had created the world's first clone of an adult animal in a breakthrough that should provide a huge boost to work on aging, genetics and medicines.

The clone is a 7-month-old sheep called Dolly, who was created at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute from a single cell taken from the udder of an adult sheep, turned into an embryo and then implanted in a surrogate mother.

"What this will mostly be used for is to produce more health care products. It will enable us to study genetic diseases for which there is presently no cure and track down the mechanisms that are involved," leader of the Roslin team, Ian Wilmut, told Britain's Press Association news agency.

"The next step is to use the cells in culture in the lab and target genetic changes into that culture," he said.

The technique could theoretically be used to clone humans -- as foreshadowed in British author Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and the film "The Boys From Brazil" in which clones of Hitler were made.

But British scientists say no responsible biologist would support such work and it would be outlawed anyway by British laws covering embryo and fertilization research.

"We are aware that there is potential for misuse, and we have provided information to ethicists and the Human Embryology Authority. We believe that it is important that society decides how we want to use this technology and makes sure it prohibits what it wants to prohibit," Wilmut said.

"It would be desperately sad if people started using this sort of technology with people," he added.

Britain's Observer newspaper said the breakthrough would make it possible to genetically engineer sheep for the production of human medicines, such as blood-clotting factors in their milk.

Scientists could also gain insights into aging by using the genes of an old animal to make an embryo and study the way tiny genetic errors were accumulated through age.

The Roslin team last year cloned sheep from cells taken from embryos and cultivated in a laboratory.

Before now it had been thought impossible to perform the same operation using cells from an adult animal, because an adult body is so much more complex than an embryo.