The pathway to animal cloning and beyond?Robert Briggs (1911-1983) and Thomas J. King (1921-2000)
✍ Scribed by Di Berardino, Marie A. ;Mckinnell, Robert G.
- Book ID
- 102337529
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2004
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 83 KB
- Volume
- 301A
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-104X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Over a half-century ago, Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King (Fig. 1) produced tadpoles by injecting blastula nuclei singly into enucleated eggs of the Northern Leopard Frog, Rana pipiens. This seminal experiment, performed in Philadelphia in 1952 at The Institute for Cancer Research (now part of Fox Chase Cancer Center), became the prototype for cloning insects, fish, amphibia, and mammals.
As early as 1943-44 Bob was pondering ''ways of testing for functional equivalence (or lack of it) in nuclei of somatic [not germ] cells'' (Patterson, n.d.). At that time his experiments focused on the effects of chromosome number on the development of R. pipiens triploids, androgenetic and gynogenetic haploids, and partial blastulae lacking functional chromosomes. The studies were published in JEZ and provided the groundwork for developing nuclear transplantation and for interpreting the results.