But the story isn't about how the children came to be. It's about how people deal with novel situations in our world. The rapid pace of science in this century means that we are faced with novel situations more frequently. Cloning, in very general terms, is creating a genetic copy of an individual. Some animals, such as the armadillo, give birth naturally to litters made up of genetically identical individuals.
Plants can produce clones of themselves through asexual reproduction.
What's more, there are already human clones living among us. They come about when a fertilized egg is split in two in the womb, creating two genetically identical embryos. Dolly was created using a technique known as nuclear transplantation. When mammals mate in the ordinary way, DNA from both a mother and father go into making the offspring. On the other hand, Dolly was created with the DNA of only one sheep.