Sunday, July 6, 2025

ON THESE DAYS



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My apologies once again for not hving posted Bytes for a few days, which was due to my being unwell.

For those not aware, I have been battling throat cancer for the last 4 years (no, I stopped smoking 24 years ago) and receiving various forms of treatment - radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immuontherapy, surgery. I am currently receiving weekly doses of a different chemical as part of a clinical trial. Whilst the prognosis is hopeful, there are some side effects which can at times be somewhat brutal abd knock one around. This was one of those times.

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Rather than posting a belated Funny Friday etc and not wanting to lose the continuing thread of On This Day,  below is the one missed and the current instalment.

Enjoy

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July 5, 1996

Dolly the cloned sheep born

Dolly was part of a series of experiments at The Roslin Institute that were trying to develop a better method for producing genetically modified livestock. If successful, this would mean fewer animals would need to be used in future experiments. Scientists at Roslin also wanted to learn more about how cells change during development and whether a specialised cell, such as a skin or brain cell, could be used to make a whole new animal.

Dolly was cloned from a cell taken from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and an egg cell taken from a Scottish Blackface sheep. She was born to her Scottish Blackface surrogate mother on 5th July 1996. Dolly’s white face was one of the first signs that she was a clone because if she was genetically related to her surrogate mother, she would have had a black face.

Because Dolly’s DNA came from a mammary gland cell, she was named after the country singer Dolly Parton. 😂

Dolly was important because she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her birth proved that specialised cells could be used to create an exact copy of the animal they came from. This knowledge changed what scientists thought was possible and opened up a lot of possibilities in biology and medicine, including the development of personalised stem cells.

However, Dolly was not the first ever cloned mammal. That honour belongs to another sheep which was cloned from an embryo cell and born in 1984 in Cambridge, UK. Two other sheep, Megan and Morag, had also been cloned from embryonic cells grown in the lab at The Roslin Institute in 1995 and six other sheep, cloned from embryonic and foetal cells, were born at Roslin at the same time as Dolly.

What made Dolly so special was that she had been made from an adult cell, which no-one at the time thought was possible.

Dolly and her surrogate mother

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July 6, 1942

Anne Frank and family go into hiding

Annelies Marie Frank (12 June 1929 – c. February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl and diarist. She gained worldwide fame posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. In the diary, she regularly described her family's everyday life in their hiding place in an Amsterdam attic from 1942 until their arrest in 1944.

Their going into hiding occurred on this day in 1942.

Following detection and arrest, Anne Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. Although the specific cause is unknown, there is evidence to suggest that she died from a typhus epidemic that spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners. Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen who knew Anne at the camp, told the British newspaper The Sun: "Her bed was around the corner from me. She was delirious, terrible, burning up." She also mentioned that she had brought Anne water with which to wash. Turgel, who worked in the camp hospital, added that the epidemic took a terrible toll on the inmates: "The people were dying like flies—in the hundreds. Reports used to come in—500 people who died. Three hundred? We said, 'Thank God, only 300.'"

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

― Anne Frank, from her diary
Frank in May 1942, two months before she and her family went into hiding

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