While cloning can offer the scientist important answers to fundamental questions about our genes, it has a much older and very natural history which long precedes the sophistications of the modern laboratory. The word 'clone' comes from the Greek klwn, meaning twig, and there is a very good reason for this. For example, every chrysanthemum plant you buy at a Garden Centre is a clone of some distant and probably long dead chrysanthemum which once supplied a side-shoot for rooting. Likewise, whenever you divide an overgrown shrub or successfully cultivate a houseplant cutting you are cloning. Elm trees and other suckering plants clone themselves naturally, sending out subterranean roots from which new plants, of identical genetic constitution, will sprout.
Deliberate cloning is as old as horticulture itself.
Thousands of years before anyone understood the physical nature of heredity, specific genetic constitutions were preserved through cloning because they bestowed on the plant desirable qualities such as disease-resistance, high yield and predictable growth. Cloning is as important to the production of fine wine, the supply of rubber and the fruit harvest as it is to the variety of an English country garden. There is nothing a priori unnatural about cloning. As with plants, a stable mixture of robustness and productivity is desirable in all agricultural and commercially important animal stock. Centuries of selective breeding have been applied to produce particular breeds with a highly selected genetic composition aimed at ensuring predictable performance.