Keith Campbell

Keith Campbell was a British biologist and, later, Professor of Animal Development at the University of Nottingham, who was a central member of the Roslin Institute team that achieved the first cloning of a mammal from an adult cell in 1996. Campbell key technical and conceptual contribution to the creation of Dolly the sheep was recognizing the importance of synchronizing the cell cycle stage of the donor cell and the recipient egg, using donor cells held in a quiescent, non-dividing state, an insight that made the nuclear transfer procedure reliably successful where earlier attempts had largely failed. His collaborator Ian Wilmut later stated that Campbell deserved roughly two-thirds of the credit for the technique that produced Dolly. Beyond Dolly, Campbell research group went on to produce other cloned and genetically modified livestock, including cloned piglets, work that advanced the use of cloning and gene targeting for producing therapeutic proteins in animals. He shared the 2008 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine with Ian Wilmut and Shinya Yamanaka for these contributions to understanding cellular differentiation, and received the Pioneer Award from the International Embryo Transfer Society posthumously in 2015.