ABSTRACT
One of the most interesting claims in Gina Kolata's Clone: the Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead comes at the very end of her highly informative and engaging narrative. Probably very little, which is probably why no one seems to have noticed this rather startling anecdote in what is still the only single-authored book available about the cloning of Dolly the sheep. Two years after Dolly, the cloning debate offers a benchmark case-study of late-twentieth-century public debate about reproductive technology and the new genetics. However, one of the problems with 'cloning' is that the birth of Dolly challenged the stability of biological facts. Dolly jumped right out of the biology rule book, and this is one of the features of her birth that has caused anxiety. Cloning by nuclear transfer does not involve the production of a new offspring from a single cell, or bud, of an adult, the way a gardener creates a new hydrangea from a cutting.
