It is as if the birds and the bees suddenly have been rendered irrelevant.
Around the world, biologists gathered at laboratory watercoolers yesterday to assess the latest installment in a gripping biotech soap opera - the creation, as if by magic, of a wee lamb named Dolly.
Scottish scientists have revealed that they used mammary cells from adult ewes to create little Dolly and eight other lambs in the spitting image - genetically - of their ovine mothers.
"The whole thing is just a mind-blower," said Ursula Goodenough, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis.
The achievement raises countless questions about fate, immortality and the nature of self, but none of that will apply to humans or anything else unless scientists can duplicate their feat in other creatures. And years of failed experiments suggest that won't be easy.
"There's certainly no way to rule out the possibility, but I wouldn't wager an awful lot that it would ever be successful in humans in the foreseeable future," said David Kirk, an embryologist at Washington University.
Even if it is, experts are split on how similar a human clone would be to its progenitor. A clone would look almost identical to the person who spawned it, biologists said, but personality or susceptibility to some diseases could still vary quite a bit. Childhood nutrition and even a mother's experiences during pregnancy can affect how a person turns out just as much as genes do.
That means the chances of evil Nazis reproducing dozens of little Hitlers with blood from a handkerchief, as they did in the 1978 movie "The Boys from Brazil," are pretty remote. Never mind the fact that blood cells don't have nuclei, so there's no genetic material in them to clone.
So it's a bit too early to mourn the End Of Sex and declare a Brave New World in which people have first names and model numbers.
In fact, there seems to be something unique about sheep that makes them especially suitable for cloning. Researchers have tried for decades to do the same trick with frogs and mice, with no luck.
Frogs cloned from adults die in the tadpole stage.
And cloned mice don't develop far beyond an undifferentiated ball of cells.
So what is it about sheep?
Nobody knows. But if someone can figure it out, they may be able to extend the cloning process to pigs, cows, maybe even people.
That would be a boon to the biotechnology industry, which could use the Scottish cloning process to make specially designed pigs and cattle for organ transplantation.
"Pigs are of great interest to be used as organ donors for humans," said James Robl, a professor of veterinarian animal science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Pigs are advantageous for transplants because they have organs roughly the same size as corresponding human parts.
and aren't susceptible to mad cow disease and related afflictions that can be passed to humans.
The Scottish process would be useful for transplants because, in addition to creating a copy of the adult animal, it gives scientists a more elegant means of genetically editing their creations. So a pig clone could be made with special immune system genes that allowed its organs to be transplanted into a human without rejection.
Predictably, animal rights activists aren't too happy about that, or the other immediate economic implication of the feat - that genetically identical herds would allow more efficient care and slaughter of farm animals.
"The main thrust of this experimentation has not been for organs, it's been for factory farming," said Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "Unfortunately, every cloned animal is going to feel the suffering that's inherent in the mass production of living beings."
If that comes to pass, it probably won't disturb beef-eating Americans pursuing their tireless quest for the perfect cheeseburger.
But plain folks everywhere get a little queasy when they think about Dolly, because she raises some of those big questions about who we are and why we're here.
And she should, said Dianne Bartels, associate director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.
"It's sort of the specter of science fiction come true," Bartels said. "What if we could clone armies of people to work our assembly lines or go to war or run the world? All of a sudden it says, you know, this could really happen in our time."