Cloning is alive and well

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Dolly the sheep was cloned quite some time ago, in 1996 in fact. I hadn’t thought about it much since but, if I had, I would have realised that was probably just the first of many. And now a news article has come up saying that John Farren-Price has cloned over 80 horses since 2017. Farren-Price runs his business, Catalina Equine, at a property just outside of Sydney. The fancy name for cloning is somatic cell nuclear transfer. The nucleus of an egg cell from an animal is removed and replaced by the nucleus of the animal you want to clone. The nucleus carries the genetic blueprint of a creature. The article says there are two commercial animal cloning operations in Australia and only a handful around the world. I don’t really know what to think about it but it all seems a bit unnatural to me. The photo is of Hercules hiding his head in his hay-bale.