Ian Wilmut

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Ian Wilmut (born July 7, 1944) is an English embryologist and is currently leading the Research Institute for Medical Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the man who played a supervisory role in the team, that in 1996 first cloned a mammal, a Finn Dorset lamb named Dolly in 1997.

Dr. Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucey (near Warwick) in England. His father, David Wilmut, was a maths teacher. Wilmut described himself as a pretty average student. He chose to study farming at the University of Nottingham because he wanted to work outdoors. There he discovered that he had no aptitude for the business aspect of commercial farming. Instead, he became interested in research, and obtained a B.Sc. in Agricultural Science.

At Darwin College, Cambridge, Wilmut met researcher Chris Porge who had discovered how to freeze cells in 1949. Wilmut became fascinated with the research. His father had a severe case of diabetes that caused blindness. Wilmut was awarded a Ph.D. in 1971; his subsequent research in Cambridge led to the birth of the first calf from a frozen embryo — "Frosty" — in 1973.

In early 1996 Keith Campbell and Bill Ritchie succeeded in producing a pair of lambs, Megan and Morag from embryonic cells. Dolly the sheep, a Finn Dorset sheep, named after the singer, Dolly Parton, was born in 1996. Dolly was the first clone derived from adult cells. She died early, in 2003, at 6 years old. In 1998 another sheep Polly was created. She was made from genetically altered skin cells to contain a human gene.

[edit] Controversy

Ian Wilmut's role in the Dolly project has since been disputed by his collaborators, because he was not fully qualified to do these procedures.^[1]. In March 2006 it was revealed that the scientists involved in cloning Dolly the sheep are in major disagreement.

In 2006, while testifying at an Edinburgh court following accusations of racial harassment of his fellow Prim Singh, Ian Wilmut denied the accusations, but acknowledged that he was not the 'father' or "creator" of Dolly, that he performed none of the experiments, that he has minimised the role of some of his fellows, and he gave most of the credit (66%) to Keith Campbell, while playing a "supervisory" or managerial role himself. Wilmut's own credit in cloning Dolly the sheep is in doubt, but is less than 1/3rd (i.e. 1-66%) as other people, in addition to Keith Campbell, did some of the work.^[2]

When asked by a reporter from the Sunday Times newspaper in 2006, ten years after cloning Dolly the sheep, about the controversy over credit for cloning Dolly the sheep, Wilmut replied "We have now done two books describing events as they were, giving everybody credit," ^[3]