On Feb. 22, 1997, Scotland's Roslin institute made a shocking announcement that would turn the scientific world on its ear.

A sheep had been born.

Of course, that's a daily occurrence in Scotland, a country with an estimated 14 million sheep. But there was something special about this one.

Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal, was born in July 1996.

Dolly, as she was known, was advanced science in sheep's clothing, the first mammal ever successfully cloned from an adult cell. After her birth in July 1996, she was first code-named 6LL3, but was re-christened Dolly after some country-western inspiration. As lead scientist Dr. Ian Wilmut said: "Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell and we couldn't think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton's."

Human cloning fears

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CBC's Kelly Crowe reports (Runs 7:47)

While a remarkable scientific feat in itself, Dolly's birth opened a legal and ethical can of worms for scientists worldwide: Now that it was possible to clone mammals, could human cloning be far behind?

Wilmut himself said human cloning is illegal and "repugnant." The benefit of cloning lies in the potential benefits to medical science, he argued.

"It will enable us to study genetic diseases for which there is presently no cure and track down the mechanisms that are involved," he said.

But since mammalian cloning had been proven possible, people continued to worry about possible consequences and reaction in some quarters was swift.

Within days U.S. president Bill Clinton signed a five-year moratorium on the use of federal funds for human cloning research. Several months later, his administration submitted the Cloning Prohibition Act of 1997, which proposed to forbid the creation of human beings using somatic cell nuclear transfer technology.

In the months after the Dolly announcement, polls showed Canadians were fearful of cloning research and the possibility of cloned humans.

Dr. Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Dr. Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, says most of the sturm und drang over human cloning is needless fretting.

"The scientific community, by and large, has absolutely no interest in human cloning and if you think about it, there's no reason that any of us would have an interest in human cloning," he argues. "It's not a way of making yourself immortal. I just don't think it's justified for any medical reasons."

Bernstein agrees with Wilmut's argument that scientists embrace cloning for its potential in disease prevention and research.

"The interest from a scientific point of view is not that we can start cloning human beings, but rather that we can start to understand this fundamentally important process of development," he says.

"There's very good evidence that many diseases, cancers, mental illness and heart disease have their origins in early development events. Dolly opened up that window of being able to understand the very complex cellular and molecular circuitries that control how a fertilized egg develops."

Cloning claims

Tension over human cloning only increased in October 2002 when Clonaid, a self-proclaimed human cloning company established by the Raelian religious movement, claimed to have successfully cloned a baby girl.

The Raelians, a religious sect that believes life on Earth was created by extraterrestrials, established Clonaid in 1997.

Briggitte Boisselier, CEO of Clonaid, the Raelian cloning institute that claimed to have cloned a baby girl in 2002.

Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist and the CEO of Clonaid, said the girl, named Eve, was "very healthy" and the clone of American woman, 31, whose husband is infertile.

In 2001, a group of European and U.S. researchers in Italy announced plans to clone a human, provoking an outcry from the Vatican and Italian medical authorities.

However, neither the Raelians nor the Italian group have ever produced a cloned human and their projects have since been widely dismissed.

"All those claims came to nothing," Bernstein says. "They were all frauds, I think it's fair to say, partly because they didn't have the technology but also because this is not trivial. Dolly was not a case of taking one egg, one cell and it worked every time. It was a rare event. Cloning, even in experimental animals, is not easy to do. [Humans] are much more complex than that."

Since Dolly, a number of other animals have been successfully cloned. The Northwest Equine Reproduction Laboratory in the U.S. cloned three mules in 2003, and a rat was cloned in China that same year. Rabbits, cattle and pigs have also been reproduced, as well as two other sheep, named Polly and Molly in 1997.

Quick facts

Since two Canadian doctors discovered stem cells in 1960, Canadians have been at the forefront of cloning and research in the area. Here's a brief history:

1963 - Doctors Ernest McCulloch and Edgar Till publish research identifying stem cells. "We showed that stem cells existed," said McCulloch. "Our studies changed the hypothesis into reality."

1992 – Dr. Sam Weiss at the University of Calgary discovers neural stem cells in the brains of adult mammals.

2000 – Dr. Derek van der Kooy, a neurobiology researcher at the University of Toronto, discovers retinal stem cells in the adult mammal.

2006 – Dr. Gordon Keller, now director of University of Toronto's McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, reveals his research team has discovered embryonic heart stem cells.

2006 - Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Calgary discover skin stem cells.

In 2005, Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, a prominent cloning scientist who had successfully cloned several dairy cows and a puppy, was found to have falsified a good deal of his research. He was stripped of his post at Seoul National University and indicted for fraud, embezzlement and breaching ethics violations.

That same year, Wilmut gained approval to clone human embryos for stem cell research. It was just the second such licence granted since Britain became the first country to legalize research cloning in 2001.

What the future holds

When Dolly was revealed to the world, hopes were high for the potential of this new technology. Cloning seemed to offer endless possibilities for therapeutic work and disease prevention, but applicable advances have been slow in coming.

"I think after Dolly, everybody thought this would be really easy to do," Bernstein laughs. "Maybe both the scientific community and the hopes and dreams of people who have illness were leading us all to believe this would all happen very quickly. This is very difficult work and we're very complex organisms, so nothing here will come easy."

Unfortunately, the one who started the excitement isn't around to see how it develops. Crippled a lung disease, arthritis and premature aging, Dolly was euthanized on Valentine's Day 2003.

But the discoveries she gave rise to will be her legacy. Research continues and, slowly but steadily, progress has been made.

"That whole area of research will continue," Bernstein says. "It has not been easy. There have been no spectacular breakthroughs, but the exciting thing about science is that you don't know what's around the corner."

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