The Birth of Dolly

This extraordinary sheep hit the headline in 1997 as the world's first cloned mammal, a testament to Scottish achievement in biotechnology.   Marking the beginning of a new era for science, the birth overturned the widely held belief that mammalian cloning from adult cells was scientifically impossible.

Wilmut's Edinburgh-based team created the cloned sheep (named after the singer Dolly Parton) by taking a cell from the udder of the mother sheep, and adding its DNA to an unfertilized egg that had its own DNA removed.  The fused cells were then grown in a laboratory before being implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother sheep.

News of the success prompted an international debate about the ethics of the technique, with a number of groups voicing fears that it paved the way for the cloning of humans.

Since the arrival of Dolly, 13 mammal species have been cloned using a similar technique used by the team led by Professor Wilmut.