Whatever Happened To Dolly The Cloned Sheep?

In 1997, the world was introduced to Dolly, the first successful mammal to be cloned and delivered alive. There was significant fanfare and coverage at the time, perhaps even rightfully so given the scientific achievement. However, fleeting public interest, guided by intentional information overload by the propagandist corporate media, soon caused Dolly to go out of sight and out of mind.

Whatever happened to her and what has become of cloning?

Born of an egg cell from a mammary gland, and hence carrying the namesake of well-endowed musical artist Dolly Parton, the ovine known as Dolly was the first successful mammalian clone after a long line of 276 previous failures to produce an exact genetic replica of the adult imitation. 

At once, the world was awed by the technological marvel (though kept in the dark about the hundreds of failed attempts prior) and aghast at the unintended consequences and possible repercussions. A few years earlier, Michael Crichton had written about this scientific journey by having Dr. Ian Malcom comment that “scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” in the morality tale of Jurassic Park. A more perfect Hollywood script for this exact moment could not better describe the circumstances of real-life cloning.

Today, while some technical progress has been made, such that one Chinese company claims to have a 70-80% success rate at cloning pigs, still other commentators note that most attempted clonings fail at a rate of around 95-97%. What’s more, the clones that do survive long enough often present with significant issues, such as genetic malformation, cancer, and shortened life spans.

It is in regard to that last point that Dolly returns back to the picture. The breed of sheep from which she was derived, that of a Finn-Dorset, has an average life expectancy of over a decade. As it turns out, Dolly lived for just six years and was euthanized prematurely due to a progressive lung disease and severe arthritis. It was also noted that her telomeres were significantly shorter than should have been expected for an animal her age.

While scientists claim that nothing about her conditions or early death was a result of the cloning process, the fact remains that she presented with problems common among cloned animals. Since then, successful efforts to clone pigs, horses, deer, bulls, and now even primates as of 2018, have been achieved. This last entry segues the scientific community from the animal kingdom to the human kingdom.

Aside from the difficulties in simply making the cloning process viable, the more important question is whether or not the ethics and morality of cloning are being properly considered.

In a rare moment of honest brilliance from the communist wasteland of Berkeley, one op-ed addressed exactly these concerns. It first posed this glaringly obvious conundrum:

“Even nature’s clones — identical twins — are not identical. They have the same genome but do not have the same personality, character, interests, style etc. They grow up to be different individuals.”

How would scientists get around that? The genetic code could be identical, but it guarantees nothing of the personality traits that make up an individual and are developed over the course of a lifetime., You could literally have the same person and a completely different person at the same time.

The article went on to raise other serious questions, including the following excerpts:

“We need to realize that cloning would produce a baby, not an adult…There is a problem here. For example, if you were to clone a diseased loved one such as a spouse, you would probably want them to be your age when you replicate them, but this is impossible.”

“[W]e cannot ignore the ethical and moral concerns that exist around the topic of human cloning. If the technology was legal, it could be abused and allow eugenic selections with enhancement in human traits. This comes with ethical and moral concerns as it would mean that we would be able to improve the human species by “selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits.”

“Cloning humans could lead to serious violations of human rights as well as human dignity, and it is up to authorities, laws and institutions to make sure to protect cloned individuals from being exploited.”

As cloning undoubtedly improves, as Elon Musk continues developing a brain link, and as the tyrannical globalists seek to embed a QR code into each of us, the legacy of Dolly gives us pause that just because we have the scientific capability to pursue certain actions, there remains the question of whether or not we actually should.