Dolly the cloned sheep’s cloned predecessor is now on display
A cloned sheep that helped pave the way for Dolly – the first ever genetically copied adult mammal – will be on display in a museum.
Morag and her identical twin Megan were cloned from the same embryo, making them the first to be replicated from differentiated cells in 1995.
The sisters’ births in June 1995 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh were a technical breakthrough that showed cloning complex beings is possible.
Morag has now gone on permanent display at the National Museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride, a town in Scotland, the museum said today.
How was Morag cloned?
Sign up for all of the latest stories
Start your day informed with Metro's News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.
By a process called nuclear transfer – but not the atomic kind. By ‘nuclear’, we mean the nucleus, a blob inside cells which contains DNA.
The nucleus is removed from the cell of an organism and inserted into the egg cell, which is empty because it had its own nucleus scooped out.
Morag’s donor cell was differentiated – so it already had a dedicated job – and was an early embryonic cell called a blastocyst.
Dolly’s birth – or creation – in 1996 sent shock waves around the world that continue to shape science and ethics today.
Experts had long assumed that the DNA of adult cells would not act like the DNA formed when a sperm wriggles into an egg.
When making Dolly, scientists used a different kind of cell than they used for Morag, a somatic cell. Unlike differentiated cells, these are blank cells from which muscle, nerves and bones are created.
The team took some of these versatile cells from an adult sheep’s milk glands and tweaked them so a sheep’s egg cell would accept them.
The study leader, Dr Ian Wilmut, then swapped out the egg’s DNA for the other sheep’s DNA by fusing them.
These fused cells, now carrying the adult sheep’s DNA, began to grow and divide as if they were a perfectly normal fertilised egg.
As simple (by scientific standards) as this sounds, none of that would have been imaginable if it weren’t for Morag and Megan, said Professor Andrew Kitchener, principal curator of vertebrate biology at National Museums Scotland.
‘Without them, there would not have been Dolly,’ said.
‘It’s very fitting that Morag forms the centrepiece of this fascinating new display at the National Museum of Rural Life, exploring the role that cutting-edge science can play in farming.’
Morag died in 2000 and was originally displayed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.