The first mammal ever to have been successfully cloned was Dolly the sheep. After years of work by Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute (and at the biotechnology company PPL) the sheep was born on July 5th 1996. She was born near Edinburgh, Scotland and lived until the age of 6 years. The interesting fact is that technically Dolly had 3 mothers.
Moron question of the day!
Was Dolly born after a foursome?
Nope. She is said to have had three mothers just because the egg and the DNA, which was used to create her was provided by two separate sheep, and the third one had to carry the embryo and eventually give birth to Dolly. The modern family one could say (somehow reminds me of Charlie Sheen :D). Now because I am not a scientist, I will not even try to explain the process of cloning, so for all the biology nerds out there click on the ‘nerd’ button > nerd. I can only tell you the end of the story. Dolly reached only half of the average life expectancy for a Finn Dorset (her breed), which is usually 12 years, and there have been many speculations about her having been born ‘old’ (genetically, not like Benjamin Button). However, the Roslin Institute denies this possibility because the cause of death was a form of lung cancer, which is very common amongst this sheep breed (especially if they live indoors, which Dolly had to because of security reasons). In addition, the health screening regularly performed by the doctors did not reveal any abnormalities, which could have been explained by advanced aging. But I think that 3 moms and 6 grannies definitely help keeping stress levels high enough to die early …
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