Opinion Express View on creator of Dolly, the first cloned mammal: A cell and a sheep

At a time when the possibility of using lab-grown meat as a sustainable source of protein is a matter of serious discussion, it may be hard to imagine the furore that was unleashed in 1997 by news of the birth of a cloned sheep, the first mammal to be thus reproduced. Dolly, born at the Roslin Institute in Scotland after a cell taken from the udder of Finn Dorset sheep was fused with an egg cell from a Scottish Blackface sheep, shook the world and sparked dreadful spectres of madmen using the technology to replicate Hitler, a la The Boys from Brazil. The embryologist, Ian Wilmut, who led the team behind Dolly and who died this week at the age of 79, took a clear stand against such speculation. Human cloning, he said, was ethically unacceptable.

Beyond the media hype, Dolly — named after the country singer Dolly Parton — represented a major scientific breakthrough. Until then, it was scientific dogma that while stem cells (found in embryos) could develop into various “specialist” cells, mature cells could not be turned back into stem cells. This foreclosed the possibility of using cells from adults for cloning. Dolly, born from a six-year-old ewe’s cell, changed that.

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Twenty-six years on, the legacy of Wilmut’s work has been far less dire than the fevered imaginings of the time predicted. Human clones remain in the realm of science fiction, but Dolly signaled the start of a new chapter in genetics. It directly led to the Nobel Prize-winning work by Japanese stem cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka, which extended the therapeutic possibilities of stem cells. Wilmut, too, sought to use the breakthrough to develop treatments for genetic disorders like Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. While he succumbed to complications related to Parkinson’s himself, having been diagnosed in 2018, his work with and since Dolly showed all that could be accomplished and the lives that could potentially be saved using a single cell.