“It’s unbelievable,’’ Princeton molecular biology professor Lee Silver told The New York Times. ‘‘It basically means that there are no limits. It means all of science fiction is true.” What had happened was this: The previous July, a team of UK genetic researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh had cloned an adult female sheep. It had taken 277 tries, but a fifty-two-year-old embryologist named Ian Wilmut had successfully combined the DNA from the cell of one sheep with the unfertilized ovarian egg cell of another sheep. The ovarian cell had been stripped of its nucleus, making it a
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