- What procedure did Ian Wilmut's team use to clone Dolly from a mammary gland cell?
- Why was Dolly's birth significant for the long-standing biological debate about whether adult cells retain full genetic instructions?
- How long was Dolly's existence kept secret before it was announced, and why?
Stem Cells and Reprogramming
Pluripotent cells and techniques for reprogramming cell identity.
- How does somatic cell nuclear transfer actually work to create a clone like Dolly?
- Why did it take 277 attempts to produce one viable lamb?
- What long-standing assumption about adult cells did Dolly's birth overturn?
- What health problems did Dolly develop later in life, and how old was she when she died?
- What did Richard Seed announce he intended to do in 1998, and what qualifications did he actually have to do it?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee frame Seed's cloning proposal as an economic stimulus plan?
- How did Seed's announcement compare technically to what had actually been achieved with Dolly the sheep?
- What role did Martin Evans's embryonic stem cell lines play in creating knockout mice?
- What observation about spleen nodules led McCulloch and Till to the concept of the stem cell?
- How long did it take for the significance of their discovery to be widely recognized in biology?
- Which four transcription factors did Yamanaka's team use to reprogram adult skin cells?
- How do induced pluripotent stem cells differ from embryonic stem cells in their origin?
- Why did iPSCs sidestep the ethical controversy that had surrounded stem cell research?
- What medical applications does personalized regenerative medicine using iPSCs promise?
- What are the four Yamanaka factors and what do they do to a skin cell?
- How did induced pluripotent stem cells change the ethical debate around embryonic stem cell research?
- Which research groups reported reprogramming human cells to a pluripotent state in 2007?
- What did Martin Evans discover about culturing mouse embryonic stem cells?
- What did John Gurdon's frog nucleus transplant experiment prove about cellular differentiation?
- How did Shinya Yamanaka reprogram adult mouse cells into a pluripotent state using just four transcription factors?
- What happened when the synthetic genome was transplanted into a recipient cell?
- How did Yamanaka reset adult mouse cells to a pluripotent state using only four transcription factors?
- Why do induced pluripotent stem cells avoid the ethical controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells?
- What kinds of patient-specific therapies has iPSC technology made possible?
- What did the prevailing biological consensus in the 1960s assume about differentiated cells and their genetic information?
- How did Gurdon's nuclear transfer experiment with a frog egg and an adult intestinal cell nucleus test that assumption?
- How did Gurdon's discovery connect to Shinya Yamanaka's later work on induced pluripotent stem cells?