Sir Ian Wilmut, the man who led the team that created Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, has died, aged 79.
Prof Wilmut headed a group of scientists at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh to create the sheep, which was born on 5 July 1996.
“He was a titan of the scientific world,” said Prof Sir Peter Mathieson, the principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, adding that Wilmut’s experiment had “transformed scientific thinking at the time”.
While sheep had previously been cloned from embryonic cells, Dolly was the first to be created from a cultured mammary cell – combining the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and an egg cell taken from a Scottish Blackface sheep.
The breakthrough marked a career high-point for Wilmut, who had been working in the field of animal science and cryopreservation since the late 1960s. In 1973 he was part of a team at the University of Cambridge that created Frostie, the first calf to be born from a frozen embryo.
When the news of Dolly’s cloning first broke in the Observer in February 1997, it created a media frenzy and sparked public debate about the ethics of cloning, including fears that the technique may be used in the future to clone humans.
Wilmut described the prospect of human cloning as “repugnant”, telling the New York Times that his work “doesn’t have anything to do with creating copies of human beings”. Instead, he said the breakthrough would enable scientists to study genetic diseases for which there was no known cure.
Dolly, who was jokingly named after the country singer Dolly Parton, went on to give birth to six lambs, and spent the rest of her life among a flock at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh. She was put to sleep in 2003, aged six, after suffering arthritis and a virus-induced lung disease.
After her death, her body was donated to the National Museum of Scotland, where she has been on display since 2003.
In 2007, four more sheep derived from the same batch of cells as Dolly were born, and were used in research into the long-term health effects of cloning.
Wilmut’s interest in the field continued throughout his career, and in particular he turned his attention to researching how stem cells could be used in regenerative medicine.
In 2006 he was made the first director of the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and two years later was knighted in the 2008 new year honours list for services to science.
He retired in 2012 and revealed in 2018 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Speaking to reporters on the eve of Dolly’s 20th anniversary in 2016, Wilmut said that without Dolly, stem cell research could be 20 years behind.
But he admitted that he had been “over-enthusiastic” about the speed at which stem cell therapies would help patients, and said the prospect of their widespread use to treat degenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s was likely to be “decades away”.