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Dr. Ian Wilmut (born July 7 1944 ) is an English Embryologist best known as the leader of the team that in 1996 , was the first to clone a mammal, a Finn Dorset lamb named Dolly , from fully differentiated adult mammary cells. Wilmut's work, published in February 1997, aroused the scientific community and pushed the concept of Cloning into the news and public debate. Dr. Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucey (near Warwick ) in England . His father, David Wilmut, was a math teacher. Wilmut described himself as a pretty average student. He chose to study farming at the University Of Nottingham because he wanted to work outdoors. There he discovered that he had no aptitude for the business aspect of commercial farming. Instead, he became interested in research, and obtained a B.Sc. in Agricultural Science . At Darwin College, Cambridge , Wilmut met researcher Chris Porge who had discovered how to freeze cells in 1949 . Wilmut became fascinated with the research as his father had a severe case of Diabetes that caused blindness. Wilmut was awarded a Ph.D. in 1971 ; his subsequent research in Cambridge led to the birth of the first calf from a frozen Embryo — "Frosty" — in 1973 . He moved to Edinburgh that year and had worked there in the Roslin Institute until 2005 , where he was a professor and Head of the Department of Gene Expression and Development. In early 1996 somebody in Wilmut's team at Roslin succeeded in producing a pair of lambs, Megan and Morag from embryonic cells. This accomplishment created a stir in the world of genetic science but scarcely caused a ripple among the general public. Dolly the sheep, a Finn Dorset sheep, named after the singer, Dolly Parton, was born 1996. Dolly was the first adult mammal that had been cloned. At the news of her birth, most of the public rose in opposition to both animal cloning and human cloning. She died early, in 2003, at 6 years old, because her DNA was the age of the donor sheep, in a younger body. In 1998 another sheep Polly was created. She was made from genetically altered skin cells to contain a human gene. CONTROVERSY Ian Wilmut's fame rests on being the first author on the 1997 Nature paper describing the work of cloning Dolly the sheep, implying that he had actually done the work of cloning Dolly, but his role in the project has since been disputed and remains in doubt (see below). In 2006 , while testifying at an Edinburgh court following accusations of racial harassment of his fellow Prim Singh , Ian Wilmut denied the accusations, but acknowledged that he was not the 'father' or "creator" of Dolly, that he performed none of the experiments, that he has minimised the role of some of his fellows, and he gave most of the credit (66%) to Keith Campbell, while playing a "supervisory" or managerial role himself. Wilmut's own credit in cloning Dolly the sheep is in doubt, but is less than 1/3rd as other people, in addition to Keith Campbell, did some of the work. Although it is not certain, it can be inferred from Wilmut's own testimony in court and from the statements of Mr Bill Ritichie, one of the two technicians who did the nuclear transfer experiments, and from an anonymous source, to the Guardian newspaper, that without the intellectual input of Keith Campbell the group would still be trying to clone a sheep. This is because Keith Campbell had the crucial idea of co-ordinating the stages of the "cell cycle" of the somatic cells and eggs which was required for successful cloning. See webpages from the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Scotsman newspapers in external links. EXTERNAL LINKS
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=2325982005 http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=2331892005 |