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Today is the birthday of a very important sheep. Dolly the sheep is often called the first clone animal in the world, and while this isn't true that doesn't mean she's not a scientific marvel. Named for Dolly Parton, this sheep was the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, which means she was the first time science got a living mammal from making a clone from stem cells.
Now cloning doesn't work like it does in science fiction in real life. It involves a lot less glowing tubes and more precisely manipulating cells and then putting those cells in a surrogate mother to carry like any other surrogate pregnancy.
Most of the scientific advancements from Dolly are less about making a second you and more about broadening what we know about stem cells, which is very important for the treatment of a number of terminal diseases. That being said, the method used to clone Dolly is known to work on primates.
As for the sheep herself, she lived for six years and was an otherwise normal sheep the entire time. She was even a mother herself, having six lambs over three pregnancies . She died in 2003 from natural causes unrelated to her unusual birth, but her legacy remains. During her time on earth she was the most famous sheep on the planet and what science learned from her is already starting to save lives.
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