Six months in prison

Cloning lab hired: farmer created giant sheep

An argali: The giant wild sheep lives in the mountains of Asia and is the largest representative of its species. It can weigh more than 200 kilos and reaches a shoulder height of over 130 centimetres.

(Bild: stock.adobe.com/Dead Tree World - stock.adobe.com)

Do you remember the cloned sheep "Dolly"? The creature created by Scottish researchers in 1996 was the first mammal to be bred not from egg and sperm cells, but from DNA from body cells. 28 years later, a biotech scandal is rocking the USA - and vividly demonstrates how quickly cloning technology can fall into the wrong hands.

When "Dolly" was created, cloning was still uncharted territory. Only a few laboratories had the technology to extract DNA from the body cells of adult animals, inject it into egg cells prepared by removing the genetic material, activate them with small electric shocks and, after a few months, transform them into a viable clone of the DNA donor animal by transplanting them into surrogate mothers. The Scottish researchers had tried more than 250 times without success before "Dolly" was born.

But then things happened quickly: after "Dolly", pigs, cats, deer, horses, dogs, mice and wolves were cloned. And wild sheep, which have now become the subject of an astonishing lawsuit in the USA. A farmer (80) has to spend six months behind bars because he cloned protected animals for years in secret - "botched" so to speak - and bred them in half of America in order to be able to offer mega wild sheep trophies for hunting tourists on vacation farms. The basis of his business was a questionable "challenge".