Dolly: The Sheep

"A clone is a living organism, which shares the same genetic information as another organism." It may or may not share the same characteristics as they are affected by the environment that they grow up in. They do have the same DNA, but they may look or behave differently from their parent. Clones are found in nature, and scientists can create one too.

Scientists at The Roslin Institute were working on developing a better method for producing livestock and learning about the changes in the cell during the development. Different people were involved, including scientists, embryologists, surgeons, vets and farm staff under the supervision of Professor Sir Ian Wilmut. This team's work led to the creation of an organism which was the first of its kind, Dolly – The Sheep.

She was a clone of a six-year-old Finn Dorser sheep. Sir Ian took the nucleus from the mammary gland of this sheep and placed it in another cell, which did not have one. The latter cell was an egg cell from a Scottish Blackface Sheep. This combination of cells produced an embryo. After a few days in a test tube, Dolly (embryo) was transferred to a surrogate mother (Scottish Blackface Sheep). She was born on 5^th July, 1996. It took eight months after her birth for the scientists to compile their results and publish them. With this publication, Dolly was announced to the world on 22^nd February, 1997. With this announcement came 3000 phone calls to The Roslin Institute from around the world.

Scientists and the public were astonished and surprised to hear about the cloned sheep and its existence. This astonishment was due to fact that she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her birth was proof that specialized cells could be used to produce clones and this fact opened up possibilities in both biology and medicine. However, she was not the first mammal to be cloned, this honour belongs to another sheep born in 1984. She was cloned from an embryo cell. Now you know why Dolly was so special.

Dolly led a normal and healthy life at The Roslin Institute until the birth of her triplets and a virus outbreak in 2000. This virus infected many sheep at the institute and Dolly was one of them. Marking the end of her healthy days, the following year she was diagnosed with arthritis when farm staff noticed her stiff walk and treated her for it, but this was not the end. Over the course of the following year she developed a cough as a result of a tumour in her lungs, which was not curable. Then the institute decided to put Dolly to sleep on 14^th February, 2003 in order to avoid the risk of her suffering. Now she rests at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and is the museum’s most popular exhibit.

Dolly was also important because it fostered the idea of having a clone or a duplicate, a concept often pursued in science fiction. Dolly's birth also contributed to the interpretation that it might be conceivable to have a clone of a human being. Similarly, “plans to clone extinct species have attracted a lot of publicity, but at present, such ideas must remain, like Jurassic Park, firmly in the realm of fiction.”