Ian Wilmut

Sir Ian Wilmut was a British embryologist who led the research team at the Roslin Institute that in 1996 achieved the first cloning of a mammal from an adult somatic cell, a Finn Dorset sheep named Dolly, produced by transferring the nucleus of a mature udder cell into an egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed. The achievement demonstrated that the genetic material in a fully differentiated adult cell retained the complete instructions needed to build an entire new animal, a result with major implications for understanding cellular development and for the science of cloning and regenerative medicine, and it made Dolly one of the most publicly recognized experimental animals in the history of science. Wilmut later credited his collaborator Keith Campbell with roughly two-thirds of the intellectual credit for the technique that produced Dolly, in particular Campbell insight about synchronizing the cell cycles of donor and recipient cells. In his later career Wilmut moved away from somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning toward Shinya Yamanaka induced pluripotent stem cell method, judging it held greater promise for treating degenerative disease. He earned his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1971, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002, and was knighted in 2008 for services to science.