The “father” of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from adult cells, has died at the age of 79. British scientist Ian Wilmut transformed scientific thinking at the time by demonstrating that specialized cells could be used to create a exact copy of the animal from which they came, something that scientists had until then believed to be impossible.
“Sometimes when scientists work hard, they also get lucky, and that’s what happened,” Wilmut told the magazine. Time. Nearly 30 years later, his discovery continues to drive many advances in the field of regenerative medicine.
Dolly’s father was born in the county of Warwickshire in the West Midlands, the son of two teachers. He studied at Scarborough School, where her father, who suffered from diabetes for fifty years and would go blindtaught mathematics.
At school he first became interested in biology. However, his true desire was to pursue a naval career, something he He had to resign due to color blindness.
Since he worked as a farm laborer on the weekends, he ended up enrolling in Agriculture at the University of Nottinghamalthough inspired by researchers from the University itself, little by little he turned towards animal sciences.
In 1966, Wilmut spent eight weeks working in the laboratory of Christopher Polge, who is credited with the development of the cryopreservation technique. With him he worked on methods of preserving semen and embryos by freezing, which ended up leading to the birth of Frostie, the first calf born from a frozen embryo.
Sir Ian Wilmut then moved to the Animal Breeding Research Organization (ABRO), predecessor of the Roslin Institute, in 1973, to continue working on reproductive cells and embryos. Specifically, he became involved in a project to produce genetically modified sheep that would produce milk with proteins that could be used to treat human diseases.
As the project progressed, it became clear that to achieve its goal it needed a new, more efficient method, so he began leading the team that developed cloning techniques to produce genetically modified sheep. On July 5, 1996, Dolly was born, in honor of the singer Dolly Partonforever revolutionizing the world of cloning.
Wilmut’s work “had a global reach”, says Professor Bruce Whitelaw, director of the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, where the miracle took place. Whitelaw emphasizes that his legacy continues to inspire numerous discoveries in “the research of human and animal biology.” His cloning method was replicated in 2005 with dogs in korea and then, in 2018, by chinese scientists with monkeys. In recent years, science has proposed to recover the lanudo mammoth through a combination of gene editing and cloning.
The year after the creation of Dolly, the American president Bill Clinton imposed a ban on the use of federal funds for human cloning. Wilmut would have to live with this controversy for a good part of his career. “Cloning a human being would be an irresponsible act,” since, apart from the ethical problems that arise, “cloning in other animals has not been successful, and anomalies have occurred in development,” he concluded at a Congress in Barcelona in 2002.
Unfortunately, the first living being cloned had to be sacrificed on Friday, February 14, 2003 due to a lung disease very common among adult sheep. And five years later Wilmut announced that he was abandoning the cell nuclear transfer technique by which Dolly was created, in favor of an alternative technique developed by Shinya Yamanaka.
Wilmut believed that this method had more potential to treat patients with strokes and heart attacks, but also to treat degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s.
With that idea he moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2005, and the following year became the first director of the MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine (now part of the newly created Institute of Regeneration and Repair). Precisely trying to cure degenerative diseases, Wilmut announced in 2018 that he suffered from Parkinson’s, and he continued to dedicate the rest of his life to researching this disease.
In the New Year of 2008 he received the title of Sir, and the same year, together with Keith Campbell and Shinya Yamanaka he received the Shaw Award of Medicine and Life Sciences.
“We have lost one of the best-known pioneers of science,” Whitelaw said. “He was a titan of the scientific world,” said Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, chancellor and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh.
Taken from: Mundo.es
