“A titan of the scientific world.” The British Ian Wilmut has died at the age of 79, the University of Edinburgh announced on Monday. The latter, who announced that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease in 2018, made history: he led the Roslin Institute team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996.
This famous sheep was, in fact, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, which was born without an egg fertilized by a sperm. What some consider one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century.
Cure degenerative diseases.
If this feat caused concern at the time (the population feared that cloning would later be applied to humans), Ian Wilmut and his colleague Keith Campbell, who died in 2012, intended to cure degenerative diseases and allow the body to regenerate damaged tissues.
At the time, US President Bill Clinton feared that “this technology would threaten the sacred family ties that are at the very heart of our ideals and our society,” notes the BBC. Ultimately, “this breakthrough continues to drive many of the advances in the field of regenerative medicine that we know today,” writes Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh in a press release.
For this experiment, a cell from the mammary gland of an adult sheep was inserted into the egg of another sheep. From there Dolly, named after country singer Dolly Parton, was born in 1997.
Source: BFM TV
