The researcher of the first successfully cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, has died
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At the age of 79, researcher Ian Wilmuth, who led the team that first cloned an animal from a cell of another adult organism, Dolly the sheep, died. A successful experiment led by Wilmouth was conducted by scientists from the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh on July 5, 1996, The Guardian reports. “He was a titan of the scientific world,” said Peter Matheson, director and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, adding that Wilmuth’s experiment “transformed scientific thinking at the time.” Dolly the sheep was cloned from the mammary gland cells of a six-year-old Finn Dorset white sheep and an egg cell taken from a Scottish black-faced sheep. Photo: Sutton Hibbert/Shutterstock/The Guardian Before that, animals were cloned only from embryonic cells. Ian Wilmuth has worked in the animal husbandry and cryopreservation industry since the late 1960s. In 1973, he was part of the Cambridge University team that created Frosty, the first calf grown from a frozen embryo. He believed that cloning Dolly the sheep would allow scientists to study genetic diseases in humans for which there is no cure. Wilmuth researched how stem cells could be used in regenerative medicine. In 2006, he became the first Director of the MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 2012, the man retired, and in 2018, doctors diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease. The sheep was named Dolly after country singer Dolly Parton. The animal has six lambs. She was euthanized in 2003 at the age of six after suffering from arthritis and a lung disease caused by a virus. After her death, her body was transferred to the National Museum of Scotland. Earlier we reported that scientists have created four clones of the legendary sheep Dolly. Read also: Why have scientists not yet cloned a person?
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