About this episode

This episode discusses the groundbreaking achievement of cloning Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell.

On July 5th, 1996, a woolly little miracle entered the world, though the world wouldn't learn about her for several months. Her name was Dolly, and she was a sheep who would become the most famous animal in modern science history. Born at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, Dolly wasn't just any lamb. She was the first mammal ever cloned from an adult somatic cell, meaning scientists had taken a cell from a fully grown sheep and used it to create an entirely new, genetically identical animal. The process that brought Dolly into existence was extraordinarily complex. Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell led the team that accomplished this seemingly impossible feat. They took a mammary cell from a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe, then fused it with an egg cell that had its nucleus removed, taken from a Scottish Blackface sheep. The resulting embryo was implanted into a surrogate mother, yet another Scottish Blackface ewe. After about one hundred and forty-eight days of gestation, out came Dolly, looking like her genetic mother, the Finn Dorset, rather than either of the Scottish Blackface sheep involved in her creation. What made this achievement so staggering was that scientists…

Topics covered

• cloning
• Dolly the sheep
• genetic engineering
• mammal cloning
• scientific achievement

Keywords

• Dolly the sheep
• cloning
• Ian Wilmut
• Keith Campbell
• genetic identical
• mammary cell
• surrogate mother
• adult somatic cell

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Finn Dorset, Scottish Blackface

Places: Edinburgh, Scotland, Roslin Institute, Scotland

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