London - Future generations have been granted the right to gaze in perpetuity at a 20th-century scientific icon. Dolly is to be stuffed.
The world's first cloned sheep (right) will be passed to taxidermists, mounted and displayed by the National Museums of Scotland, but only after she dies of natural causes.
"We have no intention of chopping her for the museum or anybody else," said Mr Grahame Bulfield, director of the Roslin Institute, of Edinburgh, which created her using nuclear cell transfusion technology. "She shows no sign of ageing now. She is not ailing. She is fit, healthy and very vigorous. We believe she could live as long as 15 years."
Taxidermists are keen to measure Dolly, born in 1996 after she was cloned from the cell of an adult ewe, while she is alive because the body shape changes after death. --(Guardian Service)
Munich scientists, seeking to capture some of the publicity surrounding the birth of Dolly, unveiled Uschi the cloned cow yesterday.
The brown and white calf, born just before Christmas, was unsteady on her feet as she emerged from a trailer to be presented to film crews. But, said the project leader, Prof Eckhard Wolf, of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University, Germany's first cloned cow was otherwise in perfectly good health.
Uschi (short for Ursula) was born using a technique similar to that deployed by the Scottish creators of Dolly.