Scientist Ian Wilmut, known as the cloner of Dolly the sheep, has died at the age of 79

Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut, who became famous for cloning Dolly the sheep, has died at the age of 79. The University of Edinburgh, to which Wilmut was affiliated, has announced on Monday. Wilmut was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2018. After the diagnosis, he worked on the development of therapies that would slow down the disease, in which brain cells slowly die.

Embryologist Wilmut achieved world fame in February 1997 together with his colleague, cell biologist Keith Campbell, when they scientific journal Nature announced that they had succeeded in cloning a sheep from the udder cell of another adult sheep, a donor ewe. The successful clone had been kept secret for months. Dolly was the first mammal in the world to be cloned, sparking heated ethical debates in the scientific world and beyond.

‘Impressive set of mammary glands’

Wilmut and his colleagues expanded on the work of the British developmental biologist John Gurdon, who already succeeded in cloning tadpoles in the late 1950s. To the outside world, Wilmut was the face of the clone Dolly. However, Campbell’s contribution to the engineering behind Dolly’s cloning was essential. Wilmut later acknowledged Campbell’s contribution, but Campbell was still disillusioned that Wilmut and not he got the credit for Dolly. He went to work for the company PPL Genetics, where he was the first in the world to clone pigs. Campbell died in 2012.

Dolly, who was initially called ‘6LL3’ and later named after singer Dolly Parton, died in 2003 at the age of six after a lung infection. Since then she has been on display in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. To explain the sheep’s name, Wilmut told a press conference at the time that “there is no more impressive set of mammary glands than that of Dolly Parton.” Wilmut called her after her death “the friendly face of science”.