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Cloning Fast Facts

By CNN

(CNN) — Here’s a look at cloning, a process of creating an identical copy of an original.

Facts

Reproductive Cloning is the process of making a full living copy of an organism. Reproductive cloning of animals transplants nuclei from body cells into eggs that have had their nucleus removed. That egg is then stimulated to divide using an electrical charge and is implanted into the uterus of a female.

Therapeutic Cloning is the process where nuclear transplantation of a patient’s own cells makes an oocyte from which immune-compatible cells (especially stem cells) can be derived for transplant. These cells are stimulated to divide and are grown in a Petri dish rather than in the uterus.

Gene Cloning creates copies of genes or DNA fragments. Gene cloning is the most common form of cloning performed by researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Genes are cloned for scientists to study in a laboratory setting.

Timeline

1952 – Scientists demonstrate they can remove the nucleus from a frog’s egg, replace it with the nucleus of an embryonic frog cell, and get the egg to develop into a tadpole.

1963 – Chinese scientists reportedly create the first cloned fish by transferring the DNA from a male carp into the egg of a female carp.

1984 – A researcher in Britain claims that he has cloned the first mammal, a lamb that was produced via the nuclear transfer of sheep embryo cells.

February 22, 1997 – Scientists reveal Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from cells of an adult animal. She was actually born on July 5, 1996.

1998 – More than 50 mice are reportedly cloned from a single mouse over several generations. Separately, eight calves are reportedly cloned from a cow.

2000 – Pigs and a goat are reportedly cloned from adult cells.

2001 – Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Massachusetts, says it produced a six-cell cloned human embryo, in research aimed at harvesting stem cells. Separately, five bulls are cloned from a champion show cattle named Full Flush.

2002 – Rabbits and a kitten are reportedly cloned from adult cells.

December 27, 2002 – Clonaid claims to produce the first human clone, a baby girl, Eve. The company declines to provide proof that Eve is a clone or even that she exists.

January 23, 2003 – Clonaid claims to have cloned the first baby boy. The baby was allegedly cloned from tissue taken from the Japanese couple’s comatose 2-year-old boy, who was killed in an accident in 2001. Clonaid again declined to provide physical evidence of the cloning.

February 14, 2003 – The Roslin Institute confirms that Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, was euthanized after being diagnosed with progressive lung disease. She was 6 years old.

May 4, 2003 – Scientists at the University of Idaho say they have cloned a mule, naming it Idaho Gem. Two additional mules are cloned that same year as part of a joint project between the University of Idaho and Utah State University.

August 6, 2003 – Scientists at the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in Cremona, Italy, say they have created the world’s first cloned horse, Prometea, from an adult cell taken from the horse who gave birth to her.

September 26, 2003 – The journal Science reports that French scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural Research at Joy en Josas, France, have cloned rats for the first time.

February 12, 2004 – South Korean researchers falsely report they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells. An investigative panel concludes in 2006 that the human stem cell cloning research was faked.

August 3, 2005 – South Korean researchers announce they have successfully cloned a dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

2008-2009 – Five cloned puppies from Trakr, a German Shepherd who worked as a rescue dog at Ground Zero, are born.

May 2009 – A clone of two-time quarter horse world champion Tailor Fit is born, one of several cloned horses born that year.

September 2011 – At South Korea’s Incheon Airport, seven “super clone” sniffer-dogs are dispatched to detect contraband luggage. They are all golden Labrador Retrievers that are genetically identical to Chase, who was the top drug detention canine until he retired in 2007.

May 15, 2013 – Oregon Health & Science University researchers report in the journal Cell that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells back to their embryonic state.

April 2014 – For the first time, cloning technologies are used to generate stem cells that are genetically matched to adult patients. Scientists put the nucleus of an adult skin cell inside an egg and the reconstructed egg went through the initial stages of embryonic development, according to research published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

January 24, 2018 – For the first time, scientists say they created cloned primates using the same complicated cloning technique that made Dolly the sheep in 1996. Shanghai scientists created two genetically identical long-tailed macaques. The research is published in the journal Cell.

February 18, 2021 – Scientists announce that for the first time, they have cloned an endangered US animal, creating a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann from the frozen cells of an ancestor in a landmark achievement that boosts conservation efforts.

April 7, 2025 – Dallas-based biotech company Colossal Biosciences announces they have created three dire wolf pups by using ancient DNA, cloning and gene-editing technology to alter the genes of a gray wolf, the prehistoric dire wolf’s closest living relative. The result is essentially a hybrid species similar in appearance to its extinct forerunner.

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Republicans may finally snare Dr. Fauci in Covid’s last culture war

By CNN
(CNN) — The Covid-19 pandemic was a historic stress test that revealed American politics as too broken to deal with a national crisis.Six years later, a new political storm over Dr. Anthony Fauci, once the nation’s most prominent health official, suggests those fractures are now even more toxic. And a long-delayed reckoning over the worst public health emergency in 100 years is more distant than ever.A Republican-led Senate committee is expected to vote to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress on Thursday after he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 100 times during an acrimonious hearing last week.Committee Chair Sen. Rand Paul accuses Fauci of obstructing his probe into pandemic policies. The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases declined to answer questions, accusing his longtime antagonist from Kentucky of laying a trap to get around a pardon he was granted by then-President Joe Biden.Last week’s hearing was a classic Washington melodrama in which each party zeroes in on a larger-than-life personality to grind ideological axes. And a contempt referral by the committee to the Justice Department would raise pressing legal and constitutional questions over the president’s pardon power.But more importantly, the new Fauci saga is a clarifying moment regarding Covid-19’s still-potent political legacy heading into the 2026 and 2028 elections. The showdown underscores the shattered consensus on public health between MAGA Republicans and Democrats who accuse their foes of flouting science. And it raises the vital question of whether any lessons have been taken from the vicious political disputes that erupted over Covid-19 mitigation methods between career health officials and the first Trump White House, and between Washington and state and local health and political leaders.Republicans finally see a way to punish FauciRepublican leaders accuse Fauci of presiding over lockdown policies that harmed the economy, public health and children’s education, and of misleading Congress about federally funded research in Wuhan, China, where they contend that a lab leak started the pandemic.More broadly, they are seeking to whitewash the erratic and sometimes politically self-serving first-term crisis leadership by Trump that contributed to his loss to Biden in 2020. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, accused Fauci of “mismanaging the Covid pandemic” and said “President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns” in a falsehood-filled appearance with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday. While the federal government offered guidelines, it didn’t mandate lockdowns. Such decisions were left to states.Populist Republicans see Fauci as an exemplar of an elite Washington deep state out to suppress personal freedoms. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno last week demanded Fauci “apologize to the people you harmed through your actions,” while Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called him “the biggest scammer in American history.”Democrats are welcoming a chance to remind the public of Trump’s Covid-19 failures and — notwithstanding his first administration’s swift efforts to deploy a vaccine — to link them to the president’s second-term assault on public health guidelines, vaccine schedules and academic research.A shattered legacyFauci’s plight is also something of a Washington tragedy. In nearly four decades at the NIAID, he was the rare official feted by Republicans and Democrats alike. Foreign governments regarded him as the gold standard of global health, and his involvement in President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR global anti-HIV/AIDS programs helped save millions of lives.Fauci was an archetypal Washington power player. But at 85, he’s become a symbol of those who cling to power too long and whose reputations end up tarnished. Excerpts of Fauci’s diaries released by the committee showed a vain and hubristic side as he seemed to gloat over his media coverage, fame and interactions with celebrities.No one argues that Fauci did everything right. Some of his advice has looked, in retrospect, to be contradictory or not supported by science.But the political heat around the famous doctor may also be an obstacle to something more important: full accountability across the public square over the pandemic, which might improve the federal response to the next emergency.In the frightening early days of the Covid-19 panic, officials were making quick decisions without the full knowledge of the properties of the virus as hospitals filled with seriously ill victims. Missteps were inevitable. But sometimes officials gave inconsistent advice or reversed themselves on issues such as masking, resulting in a loss of public confidence.Princeton professor Frances Lee, co-author of the book “In Covid’s Wake” with her colleague Stephen Macedo, points out that Fauci told CNN in January 2020 that while China had shut down travel to try to contain the outbreak, he couldn’t “imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles.” He added, “Historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”Yet weeks later, top health bureaucrats were advising governors to close schools and businesses. “How did this happen? And not just that we’re shutting down, but the man who had pronounced the Wuhan approach as unlikely to succeed is recommending it,” Lee said in an interview.The pandemic was such a horrific experience that most people just wanted to move on. But that desire has tempered a reckoning among public and medical officials for in-depth examinations of the period, Lee argued. “Looking back, what did we get right? What did we get wrong? I don’t see that kind of internal reckoning.”More controversy surrounds pandemic restrictions. Such measures are complex to evaluate, since they depended on the length of lockdowns, the density of spread of the virus, the variants circulating at any one time, and the quality of local health systems. But a full, depoliticized congressional examination of the pandemic would probe the relative success of red states that opened sooner vs. blue ones that stayed shut down longer. Such a study might address questions about the human toll of decisions such shuttering schools, which left lingering educational, mental and emotional damage.Some critics also believe that senior public health officials were so fixated on their mission of battling the virus that they ignored the full spectrum of consequences. They — and media outlets carrying their messages — might also have focused more on the pain borne by blue-collar employees, who, unlike office workers, could not log on from home.But Dr. Ashish Jha, who was White House Covid-19 response coordinator under Biden, told CNN’s Bash on Sunday that Fauci “gave advice.”“Some people listened. Some people didn’t,” Jha said, adding that “accountability has to be with our political leaders, not with scientists who are giving advice.”The Fauci hearing has also revived the debate about the origins of the virus. At the time, Trump seized on the idea it came from a Chinese laboratory — apparently to distract from his leadership failures. But the preponderance of academic studies and epidemiological data since then suggests that a zoonotic origin — meaning a disease occurs naturally in animals and spreads to humans — is the most likely derivation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, and that initial transmissions were linked to a wet market in Wuhan.Trump’s former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, accused Fauci in June of funding lab research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that caused the virus. But documents she released failed to substantiate the claims, and Fauci denies them. Still, Jha told CNN on Sunday that he had changed his own mind on how the virus started. “Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak,” Jha said.Since the issue concerns China, an authoritarian state that has refused international demands for more transparency about Covid-19, definitive answers may never emerge. But a congressional process that spent more time in the dispassionate pursuit of answers might offer some clarity.Will the Fauci storm scare away the leaders of the next national crisis response?No public official should be above answering for decisions made in positions of public trust. Fauci’s critics see him as imperious and resistant to scrutiny — even while excusing the failings of Trump, who was often a torrent of misinformation and crank cures during the emergency.But if an official as respected as Fauci is not immune from vicious, personal vilification by national leaders, other, less high-profile public servants might chose another profession and leave America ill-served in the next crisis.“These attacks upon Dr. Fauci — it’s not just about him,” Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said at the hearing last week. “It’s sending signals to others … our scientists, our doctors, our healthcare professionals, our researchers. (It’s) trying to show to them that if you don’t get in line with the politics, that you will also potentially be subject to attacks.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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