Ian Wilmut
1944-
English Embryologist
In February 1997 Ian Wilmut made international headlines when he announced that he and other researchers at the Roslin Institute in Scotland had successfully cloned the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly, from an adult animal. This meant that in the future animals could be cloned to produce proteins for the manufacture of certain pharmaceuticals. However, the experiment was not without controversy. Many speculated about what cloning could mean if applied to human beings, though Wilmut emphasized the fact that his work was intended purely for animals.
Wilmut was born on July 7, 1944, in Hampton Lucey, Warwick, England. His interest in embryology began as a student at the University of Nottingham, where he met renowned reproduction expert G. Eric Lamming. Wilmut graduated from Nottingham in 1967 with a degree in agricultural sciences, and went on to pursue his doctoral studies at Darwin College, Cambridge. There he performed his dissertation, completed in 1973, on techniques for freezing boar semen.
Upon receiving his degree, Wilmut went to work at what was then called the Animal Breeding Research Station, a government facility in Roslin, near Edinburgh, Scotland. Later it would be renamed the Roslin Institute. In 1973 he produced the first calf, Frosty, born from a frozen embryo implanted in a surrogate mother. He went on to pursue research in cloning, despite the fact that during the 1980s scientists became increasingly skeptical that cloning could become a reality. However, Wilmut was convinced that it could, and when he heard that Steen M. Willadsen of Grenada Genetics in the United States had cloned a lamb using a differentiated cell from an already developing embryo, he stepped up the pace of his research.
Keith Campbell, a biologist at the Roslin Institute, had noted that the cycles of adult andembryo cells were not synchronized, and for this reason, embryos were less likely to accept the genetic material from a transplanted adult cell. Therefore, he developed a technique for slowing down adult cells by depriving them of nutrients. Using this method, Campbell and Wilmut cloned two sheep, Megan and Morag, from developing embryo cells.
Ian Wilmut. (AFP/CORBIS.Reproduced by permission.)Next, they turned their attention to cloning an adult sheep. In order to do this, Wilmut and Campbell harvested mammary, or udder, cells from a six-year-old ewe and preserved them in test tubes, starving them by reducing their serum concentration over a five-day period. Success was not immediate: they made 276 attempts at cloning before an embryo survived. They implanted the embryo into a surrogate mother, and on July 5, 1996, Dolly—named for country singer Dolly Parton—was born. The Roslin Institute did not publish the results of its experiment until it had secured the patent for the cloning process.
Wilmut and his wife Vivian live in a small village near Edinburgh with their three children, Helen, Naomi, and Dean. An honorary fellow at the Institute of Ecology and Resource Management at the University of Edinburgh, Wilmut lives quietly, in spite of the controversy his work has raised. He continues to conduct cloning research in the hope that cloning and genetic engineering can produce proteins such as the clotting factor lacking in the genetic makeup of hemophiliacs.
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