[Missouri gal]

Swain_forkbeard, I'm not sure I understand your question. Dolly the Sheep was the result of a cloning event, not an egg donor. My comment was about the injuries women get from egg donation; increased risk of ovarian hyperstimulation, organ failures and cancer. I forgot to mention loss of fertility. Likewise, the female sheep (they needed many) whose eggs were used to attempt to create Dolly, may also have been given the same drug that women take before egg donation, and would have had the same problems, unless perhaps the eggs were taken from livestock being slaughtered, in which case the scientists wouldn't have seen those problems. They made hundreds of clones before they got one to live to birth, so they needed thousands of sheep eggs. If we were going to try to cure, say, diabetes with cloned humans, and assuming human cloning could become as efficient as cloning Dolly, we would have to force almost every woman of reproductive age in the whole world to donate her eggs.

However, if your question was about Dolly the Sheep, the only one of hundreds of clones that lived more than a few days after birth, she was killed after a few years because she was suffering many ill effects from being a clone. It turns out that our cells are so different from those of livestock, mice, dogs and cats, that it's an entirely different thing to try to clone human beings at all. It really might not be possible, even with infinite dollars and skill. Results of cloning can be ghastly. I have seen cloned mice, for which there are practical reasons to create, and they are horrible. Very often bisexual, and very unhealthy.

[swain_forkbeard]

First, I remembered wrong. I thought Dolly was the donor animal used to create the clone. But instead Dolly was the resultant clone. So I agree with you; my question did not make sense.

Second, I am not suggesting that cloning humans is a mature and reliable technical achievement. And I am not presenting an ethical argument. I am not talking about stem-cell reseach or organ harvesting or destroying embryos. I am simply saying that cloning, using an cell from an adult animal and the process of nuclear transfer (as was done with Dolly), does not kill the cell donor.