He says that the group needs to develop quality control before the first embryo transfer. They want to make sure that they are transferring embryos that do not have abnormalities. The ability to create and detect healthy embryos is one of the most difficult tasks they are facing, Zavos says. The project was announced by Severino Antinori, MD, an Italian fertility expert, who will be heading the project, and Zavos. Since Dolly the sheep was cloned in Scotland in 1997, cows, pigs, mice, and other animals have been successfully cloned.
Cloning is a process that creates a genetic duplicate of an individual.
This doesn't mean that the offspring will look exactly like the parent, but it will have the same genes. In order to clone, scientists start with an egg cell. They remove the egg's DNA, then insert DNA or a whole cell from an adult animal. The egg cells divide and grow into an embryo. The embryo is transferred to a surrogate mother and grown to term, just like human test tube babies are produced at fertility clinics.