In Dolly s footsteps
the first uk patent for cloning has been won by the us B iotechnology company Geron Corp. The company has bought the Scottish research institute that cloned Dolly the sheep. Geron bio-med, the company set up to exploit the cloning technology, is a British subsidiary of Geron based inside the Roslin institute in Scotland where Dolly was created.
The uk patent covers the nuclear transfer technology used to create the sheep. The California-based Geron will now have exclusive rights to the technology which would help doctors grow living tissue for transplants. The techinque used to create Dolly was to starve the donor cell into a state of genetic hibernation and use an electric jolt to fuse it with an egg from which the genetic material had been removed.