In 2016, two Japanese reproductive biologists, Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou, made an announcement in the journal Nature that read like a science-fiction novel. The researchers had taken skin cells from the tip of a mouse's tail, reprogrammed them into stem cells, and then turned those stem cells into egg cells. The eggs, once fertilized, were transferred to the uteruses of female mice, who gave birth to ten pups; some of the pups went on to have babies of their own. Gametes are the cells, such as eggs and sperm, that are essential for sexual reproduction. With their experiment, Hayashi and Saitou provided the first proof that what's known as in-vitro gametogenesis, or I.V.G.--the production of gametes outside the body, beginning with nonreproductive cells--was possible in mammals.

Endangered animal species could be saved from extinction after a new study has shown that mice cloned from freeze-dried cells are able to successfully grow into adults and become parents. Researchers in Japan have used freeze-dried somatic cells – animal cells other than sperm and egg cells – to clone mice. Cloned males and females were able to mate with other normal mice and produce their own healthy offspring. The team's method could bring animal species back to life after they've gone extinct in the wild, as long as their cells have already been'banked'. Researchers in Japan have used freeze-dried somatic cells to clone mice.

Us neither, but a bunch of robots can apparently now lay claim to the accolade thanks to researchers from the University of Nankai in Tianjin, China, who created an AI-powered system to direct the service. Because by taking humans (we squishy, fallible humans) out of the equation, the team behind the autonomous pig-producing tech have reduced the margin for error. South China Morning Post reports that the switch to AI-powered robots has improved the success rate of cloning pigs, something that's practiced for research and agricultural reasons. The subsequent piglets are the world's first to have been produced entirely by robots. In 2017, the same university created piglet clones from robots, but humans had to jump in for a delicate step involving removing the egg cell's nucleus. When cloning an animal, a viable egg cell's nucleus needs to be removed so that a somatic cell nucleus can be put in its place.

Five cloned monkeys have been born with a host of genetic mental health conditions in a controversial experiment in China. The monkeys - all clones of one primate - have been specially bred to create a'diseased' population of animals to use in laboratory tests. All five have the same DNA altered, which has resulted in symptoms similar to the human conditions of anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. The quintet were born at the Institute of Neuroscience (ION) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai. Researchers used the same technique as was used last year to produce Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua – the first ever two cloned monkeys - and Dolly the sheep, famously cloned in the late 90s in Scotland.