China has claimed to have successfully cloned the first Tibetan goats using the same technique as the world’s first cloned animal, ‘Dolly’ the sheep.

The scientists said the goat clones were created by cloning, which involves transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into a new egg. The egg is then implanted into a surrogate mother, who gives birth to a baby that has zero percent of her own DNA, but 100 percent of the donor’s DNA.

The firstborn weighed 7.4kg and is healthy, according to a video from state-run news channel China Central Television, but there has been no word on the second goat.

“Through cloning, genetic information can be completely duplicated”, said lead researcher Su Jianmin. The team plans to clone the goats that produce the most valuable wool. This is the same technique used to produce the famous Scottish sheep ‘Dolly’.

1996: The “birth” of Dolly – The experiment that upset the whole planet

This is the most famous cloning experiment in the world. Dolly was created from an adult sheep breast cell. The technique used at the Rosling Institute in Scotland involved transplanting a nucleus into an anucleate egg, and eventually Dolly was born, a genetic copy of the sheep from which the original cell was taken.

Dolly was an amazing biotechnological achievement. It was then a huge challenge and a promise for science and medicine.
It has been known since 1975 that in amphibians the transplantation of nuclei from differentiated cells can lead to the development of young tadpoles. In mammals, although the process of nuclear transplantation allows for successful initial growth and differentiation into complex tissues and organs, before Dolly’s birth, birth and growth into adulthood had not been reported.