Cloning has some value for plant and animal husbandry.
In the 1950s, F.C. Steward first demonstrated totipotency , the principle that every cell contains the instructions for reproduction of an entire organism, by taking the technique of growing cuttings to an extreme. He carefully pur ed a piece of carrot into individual cells, then grew an entire carrot plant from one of the cells. All subsequent cloning experiments, both with plants and with animals, have been based on this principle, and vertebrate animals were first cloned in 1970, when John Gurdon got tadpole genes to run the show in unfertilized frog eggs. In animal husbandry, cloning is a way of ensuring the exact reproduction of a desirable genetic trait. Even inbreeding is not as good for this as cloning, in which the entire genome is duplicated.