Think of clones and you form a picture of dangerous underground experiments and morally bankrupt scientists trying to make copies of themselves in the hope of taking over the world. H.G Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, Philip K. Dick's Impostor or any number of stories that involve cloning warn us of the dangerous advancement of such techniques.
One of the best-known clone stories was written by Aldous Huxley way back in 1931: Brave New World. Huxley's novel pre-dates stem cell research and heart transplants by decades, yet expertly visualizes a London in AD 2540 where scientific reproduction and sleep-learning are commonplace.
While other writers wrote about utopian futures, Huxley was one of the few writers willing to explore a dystopia where humans feared losing their identity amidst the fast-paced drive of technological advancement. Sounds eerily close to the society we live in today, doesn't it?
While Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Terminator Salvation, The 6th Day, Destroy All Humans, The Boys From Brazil and Blade Runner are works of fantasy, designed around suspense and paranoia, the real story on cloning as it stands today is far more sinister than even the darkest works of fiction. This fear is being reflected through all kinds of mediums, from books and movies to games like Bioshock and Hitman: Codename 47. It's everywhere.
When someone says 'clone', we automatically picture a human twin grown in a lab somewhere - Ripley in Alien Resurrection perhaps. The truth is there are several kinds of cloning procedures and the most basic type has actually been around for centuries: Horticulture. The word 'clone' originated from the Greek word for twig or branch. Gardeners cut off a piece of a plant, buried it in the ground and cultivated a near-perfect copy. As the meerkat says: Simples.
Okay, it's easy if you want a garden full of Magnolias, but it's a tad more difficult when it comes to reproducing something of flesh and blood. DNA Cloning - aka Molecular Cloning - is the process of taking DNA fragments picked out for their specific traits and transferring them to a self-replicating genetic element, such as bacterial plasmid (sort of like a bacterial photocopier that gives you lots of DNA samples to experiment with instead of just the one).
Next, you insert one of these healthy new cells into a host to grow. Dolly the sheep, for example, was grown by combining mammary cells from one sheep with the nucleus of another. The cells were then stimulated with an electric current and finally implanted into a third, surrogate sheep, which then gave birth to Dolly.