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Who first proposed using nuclear transfer to create clones?
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cloning
The first clone of an adult mammal, Dolly the sheep, at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh.
The concept of using nuclear transfer to create clones was first proposed by the German embryologist Hans Spemann in 1938.1
While Spemann had experimented with transferring embryonic cell nuclei into egg cells as early as 1928, he later theorized that it might be possible to generate clones by transferring nuclei from differentiated cells into enucleated egg cells. At the time, Spemann did not perform this experiment because he believed the necessary microsurgical tools were unavailable and doubted that differentiated cells could successfully guide embryonic development. His theoretical framework eventually paved the way for later breakthroughs in the field, including the work of Robert Briggs, Thomas King, John B. Gurdon, and Ian Wilmut.1