First, in 2002 the egg industry set new animal welfare guidelines, forcing farmers to give their hens more room to cluck, in turn cutting the number of birds able to be housed.

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Reproductive cloning, which created Dolly the sheep in 1997, involves transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into an egg, giving the resulting embryo a full set of genes without the normal sperm-meets-egg fertilisation step.

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They were immediately drawn to the cheaper price tag and swifter timeline (the agency they worked with in Mumbai set them up with both an egg donor and a surrogate in just six weeks).

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