Submitted by James Welch, seventh grade, Cherokee Middle School

A. "To clone" simply means to make a copy, says Tom Zinnen, who directs outreach for the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. And scientists do routinely clone specific segments of DNA, such as genes, in order to study them.

For example, it's possible to clone strands of DNA from a woolly mammoth, says Zinnen; however, what you wind up with are more copies of those strands, rather than a mammoth itself.

Why is this?

"Just as one recipe card doesn't make a whole recipe book, having one, two or even a few hundred genes of a mammoth doesn't give us the whole collection," Zinnen said. "But if we had a living, intact mammoth cell -- a cell with a complete set of all the genes in working order -- then you could imagine cloning many copies of that cell inside a test tube."

Essentially, the cell would clone itself through the act of dividing.

The next step would be to take the part of the cell containing the DNA -- called the nucleus -- from one of the cloned mammoth cells and put it into an elephant egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed.

"You'd then watch to see if that egg, when put into the uterus of an elephant, would grow into a baby mammoth," says Zinnen. "This is all a stretch, but I think it's in the realm of the plausible."

In fact, these are precisely the steps that scientists followed to clone Dolly the sheep.

-- Produced in cooperation with University Communications

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