Ian Wilmot, the British scientist who led the project to clone a mammal for the first time, Dolly the sheep, died on Sunday, shocking scientists who thought such a procedure was impossible. He was 79 years old.
The Roslin Institute, a research center near Edinburgh where Dr. Wilmot worked for decades, He said in a statement that the reason It was a complication of Parkinson’s disease. He did not say where he died.
Dr. Wilmot and his team made headlines around the world in February 1997, when they announced the remarkable birth of their subject in the journal Nature.
It was already known that cloning from embryonic cells was successful; In 1995, Dr Willmott and his research partner, Keith Campbell, replaced the nucleus of two sheep embryos with those of two other sheep, producing two identical ewes, Megan and Morag. (Dr. Campbell passed away in 2012.) But most scientists thought it would be impossible to clone an animal using adult cells.
They said that the problem is that the embryonic cell only accepts a nucleus from another embryo. It was Dr. Campbell who devised the solution: by taking a differentiated cell and starving it, he could put it into a dormant state, a state that would trick the recipient embryo into accepting it.
The work was hard. Out of about 300 attempts, only one embryo proved viable. Dolly, named after singer Dolly Parton, was born in July 1996. Dr. Wilmot decided to keep the news a secret until he and Dr. Campbell were sure she would survive childhood.
The announcement of Dolly’s birth was among the biggest news events of 1997, along with the handover of Hong Kong from the British to China and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It was met with a mixture of awe and concern, with politicians and medical ethicists calling for an immediate ban on human cloning.
Dr. Wilmot agreed. In the spring of 1997, he toured the United States, where he met scientists, spoke to standing-room-only crowds, and testified before Congress.
His message was consistent: human cloning should never be allowed. He described the mere possibility of this happening as “offensive”, due to the risk of birth defects and the fact that the clone would never be accepted as a full human.
“Human cloning has captured people’s imagination, but this is a distraction that we personally regret and find distasteful,” Dr. Wilmot wrote in his book, The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control, which he published in 2000 with Dr. Wilmot. Campbell and Colin Tudge.
Dolly’s life seems to have some risks. Although she was able to give birth to lambs, she developed early arthritis and showed other traits more commonly associated with older animals. After she developed a viral lung infection in 2003, veterinarians euthanized her.
Her stuffed body was on display National Museum of Scotland Later that year.
“She was a friendly face of science,” Dr. Wilmot said in an interview with The New York Times after Dolly’s death. “It was a very friendly animal and was part of a major scientific breakthrough.”
Ian Wilmot was born on July 7, 1944 in Hampton Lucy, a village near Stratford-upon-Avon, England. His parents, Leonard (also known as Jack) and Eileen (Dalglish) Wilmot, were teachers.
He enrolled at the University of Nottingham intending to become a farmer, but gave up after realizing that he was, as he later said, “incapable of using tractors.” A summer internship at the University of Cambridge’s Animal Science Laboratory convinced him to try academic research instead.
After obtaining a degree in zoology in 1967, he went straight to Cambridge, where he obtained a doctorate in embryology in 1971; His thesis was on freezing pig semen. He continued this work at the Animal Husbandry Research Station, outside Edinburgh. (The facility became the Roslin Institute in 1993.)
In 1973, Dr. Wilmot and a team of scientists became the first to breed a calf from a frozen embryo, a feat that revolutionized animal husbandry.
By the 1980s, he became more interested in the medical, rather than commercial, applications of his work. His father had diabetes, which left him blind for the last 30 years of his life, a family tragedy that moved Dr. Wilmot forward.
They said he and Dr. Campbell chose to work in sheep farming because in Scotland the animals are everywhere and they are cheap. Their original goal was to produce milk containing proteins used to treat human diseases, and to make stem cells that could be used in regenerative medicine.
After the hype surrounding Dolly’s birth died down, Dr. Wilmot continued his cloning research. Despite his early opposition to working with human cells, in 2005 he obtained a license from the British government to clone human embryos in order to produce stem cells, on the understanding that the embryos would be destroyed before they became viable.
But he quickly abandoned this work after a team of scientists in Japan discovered a way to develop stem cells without using embryos, a much more efficient process that relied directly on his work.
Dr. Wilmot was awarded a knighthood in 2008, an honor that was met with some protests by medical ethicists, who maintained that his achievement was fraught with ethical risks, and by former colleagues who believed that other people, including Dr. Campbell, deserved more credit. . . He moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2005 and retired in 2012.
Dr. Wilmot married Vivian Craven in 1967. She died in 2015. He is survived by his second wife, Sarah. His son Dean. His daughters, Naomi Wilmot and Helen Wilmot. And five grandchildren.
Dr. Wilmot revealed he had Parkinson’s disease in 2018. This, incidentally, was one of the conditions he envisioned his work treating. He also said he would participate in a research program to test new types of treatments aimed at slowing the disease that affects the part of the brain that controls movement.
“Dolly has developed from this rich seed, and we can hope to achieve similar benefits in this project,” he told The Times in 2018.
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