Modest, mild-mannered and unassuming, Ian Wilmut didn’t fit the popular stereotype of the pioneering scientist.
But his work that produced Dolly the sheep in 1996 wasn’t just a landmark in regenerative medicine – it helped reshape the relationship between science and society.
The biological significance of Dolly the sheep is often misunderstood. She wasn’t the first clone of a mammal. Wilmut’s team and others had previously cloned sheep using cells taken from sheep embryos.
Dolly mattered because she was the first mammal to be cloned using adult tissue, or “somatic” cells.
Until the breakthrough at the lab at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, biologists believed that once a mammalian cell had matured into a specific tissue type, it was impossible to “turn back the clock” and make that cell capable of turning into another.
What Wilmut’s team proved (and it was always “team” – Wilmut disliked taking personal credit for the collaborative work) was that it was possible to “reprogramme” somatic cell.
What’s more, if treated right and implanted into a surrogate ewe it could recreate a whole new organism – a clone of the original.
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As Wilmut said in an interview in 2019: “The most important effect of the Dolly experiment was to make biologists think differently.”
To biologists, the significance was huge. If it’s possible to turn any cell in the body back into an embryonic-like cell, it’s therefore possible to recreate new adult cells exactly matched to the original donor.
It was a huge boost to the emerging field of regenerative medicine that hoped to be able to recreate bespoke new tissues or organs to replace those lost to accident or disease.
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