Not many people would be willing to say that their lives had been transformed by a sheep. But the embryologist Ian Wilmut, who has died aged 79, was happy to acknowledge the impact of a Finn-Dorset cross called Dolly on his subsequent reputation and career.
Dolly, born on 5 July 1996, was the first mammal in the world to be cloned from an adult cell. She was one of a succession of cloned lambs born as a result of Wilmut’s research programme at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, into ways of genetically engineering farm animals so that they would produce medically useful products in their milk. This comparatively prosaic ambition was almost entirely eclipsed in the public imagination after Dolly’s birth. Her arrival overturned the biological dogma that once a cell had adopted its specialised identity in an adult, it could not be induced to form a new individual.
