Moira, twice

Somatic cell nuclear transfer is, described plainly, an act of substitution.

You take an unfertilised egg and remove its nucleus, leaving the machinery of a cell with none of the instructions. You take one ordinary body cell from the animal you intend to copy — in our case a skin cell from the ear of a six-year-old Scottish Blackface called Moira — and starve it until it gives up on dividing. Then you put the second inside the first and pass a current through it, and if the current is right, the egg accepts the new nucleus as though it had always been there and starts, on no evidence whatsoever, to build a lamb.

The number nobody puts on a poster

Dolly was one success out of two hundred and seventy-seven. That figure is thirty years old and the technique has improved a great deal.

Ours was one out of forty-one.

She was delivered at 04:40, 4.1 kilograms, and stood after nineteen minutes, which is completely unremarkable and was at that moment the most interesting thing I had ever seen.

The Scottish flock register has a field for a lamb’s dam and a field for its sire. It has no field for the case where both are the same animal as the lamb. We put Moira in all three and left a note for whoever came next.

I want to be precise about my contribution, because the alternative is that this website simply says I cloned a sheep.

I cloned a sheep.