| MadSci Network: Cell Biology |
Hi Jackie,
The cost of cloning an animal like Dolly is actually pretty tricky to calculate. As you can well imagine with all the publicity its had, this is an area of active research and progress. Things are changing extremely rapidly so all information should be considered as being at risk of being outdated. That being said, let me briefly address the complexities involved in cloning before quoting you a number.
As it stands today, if you want to clone an animal, it's not just a simple matter of mixing two cells and seeing the result. As Dolly's example showed, things are a good deal more complicated than that. Cloning involves removing the nucleus of an unfertilized egg cell from a fertile female. Once the nucleus (which contains the chromosomal DNA) is removed, the egg cell can no longer divide and multiply. The next step is to remove the nucleus from the animal you want to clone and to insert this nucleus into the denucleated egg cell you already have (however, you do have to briefly "starve" the cell you want to clone before removing its nucleus in order to "activate" its full complement of genes). This fused cell is then placed in the appropriate medium for a brief period of culturing; if all goes well, the embryo is then placed in the uterus of its recipient where it's allowed to come to term.
In the case of Dolly, 277 such fused cells were produced. Of these, only 29 made it to the stage of being viable embryos and so only 29 were placed in the uteri of their recipient sheep mothers. Out of these 29 embryos, only one live lamb survived: the extremely photogenic but somewhat laconic Dolly! Obviously this procedure is time consuming and complicated and so the associated cost is also very high: Dolly cost a total of approximately $750,000 (and that doesn't include all the years of research that went before)! Although this was the cost to give birth to Dolly, the cost varies for other animals. Also, many, many scientists are actively trying, via various techniques, to bring the cost of the procedure down from the $1 to $2 million price tag. Some are already producing promising results but, as I mentioned at the outset, the field is developing so rapidly that new advances are literally being made week to week. The best way to keep track of all this is to just scour the Web for the latest information. To aid your continuing research, I'm including some links below to get you started. I hope this helps!
Good luck on your project,
Rick.
Try the links in the MadSci Library for more information on Cell Biology.