Robert Briggs

Robert Briggs (1911 to 1983) was an American scientist who, together with Thomas Joseph King in 1952, cloned a frog by nuclear transfer of embryonic cells, the first successful nuclear transplantation in metazoans; the same technique, using somatic cells, was later used to create Dolly the sheep. Raised by his grandparents in Epping, New Hampshire, after his mother died, he began in the business school of Boston University but turned to science and graduated in 1934, then took his doctorate at Harvard in 1938 with work on the metabolism of frog embryos. He spent four years as a fellow in the zoology department at McGill University studying tumors in frogs, and in 1942 joined the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute in Philadelphia, now the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where he worked on amphibian embryos for the rest of his life.