Well, hello, Dolly!

"Nuclear weapons are much more dangerous than this."
Dr. Ian Wilmut

The sheep hit the fan in February, when scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute announced that they had cloned a ewe. Dolly, cloned from cells from another sheep's udder, became an overnight celebrity -- and the center of a heated debate.

The cloning was landmark, the first time a mammal was cloned from a cell other than a sperm or an egg. But the process has been widely misunderstood -- it produces an embryo, not a carbon-copy adult.

Even identical twins are substantially different, so there's no guarantee that, say, a clone of Albert Einstein would be another Albert Einstein. And there are far more failures than successes, scores of embryos that didn't develop compared to the one that did.

The experiment raised concerns about cloning humans, a possibility scientists stress is far in the future. But President Clinton in March banned federally funded research into human cloning, just in case, while scientists debated whether it would ever become possible -- or even inevitable.

Later in the year, scientists at Roslin announced that another sheep -- Polly -- had been cloned with a human gene added. Polly, it is hoped, will produce a protein that some humans, including hemophiliacs, need.

In September, scientists announced that they would try to introduce Dolly to the joys of motherhood, the low-tech way. The goal is to find out whether Dolly is capable of bearing healthy offspring.

That promises to be a simpler and less controversial procedure, says Professor Graeme Bulfield, the institute's director. "It will probably be a matter of putting them out in a field and letting them get on with it."