"Transplantation of Living Nuclei from Blastula Cells into Enucleated Frogs' Eggs" (1952), by Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King

In 1952 Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King published their article, "Transplantation of Living Nuclei from Blastula Cells into Enucleated Frogs' Eggs," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the culmination of a series of experiments conducted at the Institute for Cancer Research and Lankenau Hospital Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In this paper Briggs and King examined whether nuclei of embryonic cells are differentiated, and by doing so, were the first to conduct a successful nuclear transplantation with amphibian embryos. Previously nuclear transplantation had only been performed using amoebae cells. Briggs and King believed that by removing the egg nucleus and replacing it with a differentiated cell, they could study nuclear differentiation. During the experiment, they used two different species of frogs, Rana pipiens and Rana catesbeiana, to study and test whether the nucleus is differentiated. The nuclear transplantations performed in the experiment would later be referred to as cloning.