It was first done with plants. A cutting taken from a plant and transplanted grew to be an...

Professor Bruckner: [explaining cloning to Lieberman] It was first done with plants. A cutting taken from a plant and transplanted grew to be an exact duplicate of the donor plant. Now we are doing the same thing with laboratory animals. Ezra Lieberman: You mean, you can produce an animal from itself? Professor Bruckner: We take the unfertilized egg of an ovulating female, and destroy all of its genes and chromosomes. We then implant a nucleus of a donor's cell, which could be taken from a blood sample, or even a skin scraping. That cell, with its genetic material intact, eventually becomes an embryo and is born as a living creature. Ezra Lieberman: Without parents? Professor Bruckner: Well, it has no father because the egg was never fertilized, no mother because its genetic code comes from another being. Can you follow that? Ezra Lieberman: And this creature... is an exact duplicate of itself? Oh, Doctor, how can that be? Professor Bruckner: Come along. Our experiments began with the simplest of animals: shrimps, frogs, animals in which the female's eggs are fertilized externally. Then we moved on to mammals. We tried several laboratory animals, and found the rabbit most convenient. I had to develop instruments which could accomplish the operation, and a whole micro-injection system. I'll show you how it's done...