Dolly the Sheep’s executioners clearly have a knack for the apt moment. When they put the first mammalian clone to sleep on Friday, they uncannily threaded her short and starry existence into a 50-year-old narrative. With her death in February 2003, they closed genetics’ age of innocence that began exactly fifty years ago.It must have been another wintry day in February 1953 when Francis Crick strode into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and announced that James Watson and he had “found the secret of life”. The story may be apocryphal — though it was repeated with great relish by Watson — but the claim was legit. With intuition and innovation, they had cracked the double helix structure of the DNA and figured out how it carried the genetic code. Majestic celebrations and seminars have been planned for the fortnight ahead to mark mankind’s ascent up that spiral staircase. Dolly, in her sudden exit, has provided a vantage point to assess that journey.From the minute Ian Wilmut’s team at Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute announced in 1997 that they had midwifed Dolly into existence by cloning a dead, nameless sheep, the world split into two camps. For some — dare I say, most — she was the embodiment of the inexorable march of technology, of progress towards a better, healthier, more prosperous future. The biotech century, for them, had arrived three years early; her health bulletins — tracking her weight-loss regimen, aging chromosomes, arthritis in the left hip and knee, frisky brood of six lambs, and finally cancer in the lung — were postcards about man’s slow mastery over Nature, intimations about a tomorrow free from scourges like Alzheimer’s and organ failure.For others, she was a constant reminder of a nightmare waiting to begin, of the perils of dabbling in the “realm of God”; each time another species was cloned, the countdown quickened to the first human clone and thence to a soulless army of designer-gened men and women reigning over a biological underclass. The end of the world as we knew it, they reckoned, was nigh and a loony cultist’s claim that the first human clone had been delivered confirmed their wildest nightmare.Dolly, however, was more than the rallying point for these nature versus nurture debates, for crash courses into the critical differences between therapeutic and reproductive cloning. She was a reminder of a burning human attraction for unexplored frontiers. Many many more will crowd into the clones gallery in coming days — including slightly modified ones, increasing the chances of organs on order for wanting humans. But Dolly will remain the star. Before her chromosomes and her lungs gave up on her — before they cautioned us against unfettered cloning — she showed us what could be. She was the first.
