Was Dolly the Sheep Really a Clone?
— In the latest embarrassment for the peer-review process, the Journal of the American Medical Association has an unbelievably sloppy article in which Irving Weissman invents new terms (pseudozygote?) and tries to claim that the creation of cloned stem cells should not be considered “cloned” stem cells. OMFSerge from Imago Dei mercilessly dismantles the political snow-job and shows why the scientific community needs to do a better job of policing their own journals. As I pointed out at Imago Dei, Weissman is correct. Organisms produced by somatic-cell nuclear transfer have mitochondrial DNA from the egg donor and nuclear (chromosomal) DNA from the nucleus donor, and thus are not genetically identical to either one. It is conventional to call these organisms “clones” because the nuclear DNA is the stuff that’s most important and it all comes from one source, but the organisms still are not completely genetically identical to a single parent, which is the definition of clone as used to r
