Ian Wilmut Biography

Ian Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucey, England, and raised in the ancient town of Coventry, a medieval town devastated by German bombs during World War II. His childhood interest in the outdoors and farming led him to study agricultural studies at the nearby University of Nottingham. Summer internships in focused his interest on embryology. He began to concentrate on animal genetic engineering and received his doctorate at the Uiversity of Cambridge in 1971. His thesis was on the freezing of boar semen. Since his postdoctoral work, he has been in the forefront of genetic research.

In 1973 he was part of the team that produced the first calf from a frozen embryo, an animal the team named Frosty. In 1974 he joined the Animal Breeding Research Station in Edinburgh, Scotland, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the University of Edinburgh. It is known today as the Roslin Institute.

A conversation in a pub in 1986 changed the course of his career. He was told that a Danish embryologist had succeed in producing a lamb from the cells of an already-developing lamb embryo. Wilmut began to explore the possibility of cloning a lamb from cells of an adult sheep.

When another laboratory produced a fraudulent report of the successful cloning of mice, funding for cloning research nearly dried up. Wilmut and his colleague, Keith Campbell worked on virtually alone while the rest of the scientific community abandoned the concept.

In early 1996, Wilmut and his team at Roslin first 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. A very different reaction took place a little more than a year later. In February 1997, Wilmut announced the birth of a lamb called Dolly, named for country singer Dolly Parton. Unlike the previous clones, Dolly was created from the fusion of an ovum with the mammary cell of an adult sheep, creating a genetic replica of the original animal. The announcement created a sensation, and stirred fears in the general public that the cloning of a human being would be the next step, a development Wilmut opposes.

The cloning of animals holds out the promise of significant development for medicine. The proteins of pig cells, for example, are identical to those found in human cells, and may enable the production of proteins needed for the treatment of hemophilia, or even the synthesis of donor organs for human transplant patients. Producers of milk and wool may also benefit from the cloning of the best strains of cows and sheep.

Despite the misgivings many have about this kind of research, it is a discovery of fundamental importance. It proves that cells of an adult animal can be returned to the undifferentiated embryonic state from which a complete animal can develop.