Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead

I wanted to get some background on the events leading up to the passage of the embryonic stem cell legislation that Obama signed this year. This is of course an older book but it gave me the background I was looking for and fueled my interest in looking for more current information. It is basically the history for which I was looking.

This book shows a typical pros and cons of a science-for-general-audience type of book. Kolata, one of the most famous author in this field, offers numerous numbers of intriguing anecdotes in the peripheral realm of cloning. For instance, I found the Karl Ilmensee affair quite Intriguing , and a question like "what if a newspaper breaks the embargo policy of Nature (which happened)?" was answered to my satisfaction. However, no story sheds much light on the central issue of biology. I would not be surprised if many general readers of this book would think that the purpose of the cloning of sheep was to generate some artificial protein in non-human live stock. Three technologies developed in 80's and 90's, namely recombinant protein expression, transgenic animal, and cloning are very confusing for non-scientists lay persons, but author never try to disentangle this confusions. For me, I wish Kolata took a further step to provide some coherent hypothesis to explain the fundamental nature of this eureka event, as she has a good background in humanities. This type of the once-in-a-decade discovery has a nature to defy the conventional thought prevailing the era. Almost no developmental biologists thought the chromosome from somatic cells of adult mammal could gain totipotency by such a "primitive" method. Why can some scientist have the insight, while others can't? Is this a necessary byproduct of what Kuhn called paradigm? Or could this be at least an partial evidence of the relativism or instrumentalism advocated by WV Quine, or some other social contructivist? (or just a serendipitous application of "Don't worry Principle" that Sydney Brenner called?) Neverthless, Kolata shows a great story-telling skills and I would recommend this book.

Looking for an accessible guide to cloning together with sex, scandal, a putative hoax, a fraud claim, counterclaims, industrial secrets and a cast of maverick scientists and myths that makes for a greatly entertaining true story ? To find a single book which has the potential to affect one's ideas and thoughts as to what it means to be human is a rarity, but some readers might be so affected by this work. Thematically weaving between the key historical developments leading to claims for the first cloning success using adult tissue and discussions of the moral ethics of whether and why such research be conducted, Kolata's account of the making of `Dolly' the sheep reminded me of Watson's `The Double helix'. Not only do we read here about the manipulation of genetic material outside the realms of human replication and fertility, we are continually provoked with the wider issues relating to food production processess, the social responsibilies of the research scientist, and the role of science journalism in informing public opinion.We are also exposed to the less attractive side of running the day-to-day life of the research laboratory - the struggle with grant competition; peer pressure, review and publication demands; conference attendance and institutional sponsor politics. Kolata provides all of this in a very well written and researched book including frank (and seemingly) honest biographies of the leading players in the `road to Dolly'. The story as presented here covers a period of just over one hundred years following Weismann's discovery of the `loss of information' with subsequent cellular differentiations of dividing tissue. Within twenty years or so the role of the cell nucleus had been determined, and by 1938, Spemann's `Embryonic Development and Induction' proposed the very nuclear transplant experiment that was to succeed some 60 years later. The first successful accounts of this technique involved the use of the embryonic frog tissue in the 1950s by Briggs & King, but the older, more differentiated cell' nuclei proved harder to handle and maintain. In the early 1960s, Gurdon succeeds with the transfer of what were thought to be adult, fully differentiated cells taken from amphibian intestines. At about the same time as these developments were unfolding, the first symposia to address the possibility of cloning and its implications for ethics had taken place. The end of the 1960s had seen the advent of gene isolation (though curiously little is said about the discovery of DNA itself and the significance of the newly founded growth area of molecular biology) and within the next ten years we had moved from the in vitro fertilisation of mice to Louise Brown, born in 1978. That same year saw the publication of a non-fiction book claiming that the real-life `rich, eccentric Max' has himself cloned with the assistance of a World renown scientist known by the pseudonym `Darwin' with the assistance of a seventeen year old virgin called `spa

This is a very fine book, even if you don't have a burning desire to make copies of yourself. As Gina K helps us understand, cloning is just a huge metaphor for the complexity and wonder of modern biology. To the media, its a way to sell papers and ads. To the scientists, its sometimes a way to get grant money, and sometimes the path to the most important medical advances imaginable. And, to the public, its an opportunity to get excited and hopeful about the future of man, or resentful and apoplectic about the schemes of these bad, mad, godless scientists. And to the moral arbiters of science (mostly illustrious residents of Cambridge, MA) its a chance play premature Cassandras to a poorly-informed and suggestible public. This must have been a difficult book to write, because a very complicated stage must be set; Kolata starts by reviewing the history of cloning, beginning roughly in the 50s with frog cloning (Briggs and King), then passing thru whackiness-posing-as-journalism (Rorvik), fraud posing as science (Illmensee) before arriving at genius in the person of a Faust-like Danish vetrinarian (Willadsen) and finally the methodical Scottish cloner himself (Wilmut). Its obvious that Kolata's journalist/scientist heart belongs to Willadsen, who is the scientist we all wanted to be when we were grad students. Contemptuous of arbitrary authority and received wisdom, with golden hands and an inborn passion for the mysteries of cell, embryo and organism. Willadsen seems to be the genuine article - he makes me proud to be 1/8th Danish! Read this book to see how science really happens. You'll thank me.