Hello, Dolly.

On the cusp of Women's History Month, the papers announced that an embryologist from Scotland had for the first time successfully cloned a sheep whose fleece was white as snow and named it Dolly. When asked for comment on the implications of such a discovery, the fabulously named Dr. Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, quipped. "There'll be no need for men."

Hello, Dolly!

Before examining less promising implications, let's have a look at the great Scot and what he did. Dr. Ian Wilmut, a father of three children whose names he has trouble remembering, is described most eagle-scoutishly by his colleagues as "careful, diligent, honest, and thoughtful." That's supposed to make us all feel better, but somehow it doesn't quite allay the worries. Plus, he wears sheep cologne.

The day after the announcement and faster than you can say "how to make a knapsack bomb," the instructions for cloning were on the Internet at www.anewewe.org. I downloaded them and despite that "do not try this at home" warning, I did.

The recipe is quite simple: First, take a cell from a sheep and keep it in a tissue while removing the DNA-containing nucleus from an unfertilized sheep's egg. So far, so good. Next, fuse them together into an embryo.

As in every family recipe, Dr. Wilmut left some instruction or ingredient out. Try as I might, I could not get them to fuse, even though I played "Peter and the Wolf" very softly in a darkened room. Might have been the wrong voltage. I was, therefore, unable to transfer the embryo into a surrogate mother sheep, as Dr. Wilmut had done, where it was supposed to divide and develop like a normal embryo. It's probably just as well. My apartment is tiny. and there are rules about pets.

The implications of this new development are enormous:

* Miss Shari Lewis won't have to buy new tube socks.

* "babe" will clone sequels.

* Nursery rhymes will have to be updated (e.g., "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb all by herself").

* Children's songs will have to be updated (e.g., "Old MacDonald had a farm ... and on his farm he had ... a pigsheep - with an `oink bah' here and an `oink bah' there, here an `oink,' there a `bah,' everywhere an `oink bah'").

* Pope John Paul, who himself was cloned from a large kielbasa, orders a revision of that "Lamb of God" song.

* My Daughter, Myself will become a best-seller from the Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

Meanwhile, Woolite workers are doing overtime. Insomniacs are thrilled. Polar Fleece people are panicked. Condom makers ecstatic. Narcissists vindicated. Term limits obsolete.

Unlike Dr. Morethan Goodenough, my first thought was not the end of husbandry but, "Oh great, just what we need - more sheep."

Flocks of sheep are backing off campaign-finance reform.

Democratic sheep are letting Alexis Herman take the fall for Clinton's fundraising abuses. One Republican sheep almost left town to become president of Pepperdine. In D.C., wolves in sheep's clothing are letting that town go back to grass.