Teruhiko Wakayama (left) and Tony Perry (right) Credit: PROBIO AMERICA/NEWSMAKERS

No discussion of cloning's landmark achievements would be complete without mentioning ‘team Yana’. Working in the lab of Ryuzo Yanagimachi at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, scientists led by Teruhiko Wakayama stunned the world in 1998 by cloning scores of mice, some of them clones of clones.

Rather than fusing a donor cell with an egg, like other groups working in the field, Wakayama developed a technique in which he removed the donor cell's nucleus and injected it directly into the egg using a piezoelectric device. The university filed for a patent on the method, and granted an exclusive license to a local company called ProBio, headed by Australian businessman, Laith Reynolds.

But the story has since gone sour. ProBio is still waiting for the cloning patent to be granted, but ‘team Yana’ has broken up. Tony Perry , a member of the team, is suing the university over the rights to a transgenic technology, now licensed to ProBio, which was developed by him while he was a European Molecular Biology Organization research fellow in Yanagimachi's lab. Although Wakayama has not sued over the rights to his cloning technique, he is understood to be similarly unhappy. Both scientists have now left for Rockefeller University in New York, but declined to discuss the reasons for their move with Nature.