[News Figures] Ian Wilmut, Key Figure Behind the Birth of Cloned Sheep Dolly

'Ian Wilmut' is a British developmental biologist and a world-renowned life scientist who led the research team that created the world's first cloned sheep, Dolly, in 1997, and was knighted by the British Royal Family. He majored in Animal Science at the University of Nottingham and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

In July 1996, while working at the Roslin Institute in the UK, he, along with Professor Keith Campbell from the University of Nottingham, successfully cloned the world's first mammal, 'Dolly,' using mammary gland somatic cells from a six-year-old Polish Dorset sheep.

Dr. Wilmut during his lifetime and the cloned sheep Dolly.
[Photo by University of Edinburgh]

The research team named the clone 'Dolly' after the famous singer Dolly Parton, as the cloning was done using mammary gland cells. Dolly was euthanized at the age of six in 2003 due to a lung infection and is now exhibited at the National Museum of Scotland.

It is known that Professor Campbell, Wilmut's research partner, contributed about two-thirds more to Dolly's creation than Wilmut. However, when the co-researchers published their paper in Nature, Wilmut's name was listed first simply due to alphabetical order, making him the first author.

In 1999, Wilmut was awarded the Order of the British Empire (4th class) for his contributions to embryonic development, and in 2008, he jointly received the Shaw Prize, known as the Nobel Prize of Asia, along with Keith Campbell and Shinya Yamanaka for their research on mammalian cell differentiation.

Later, Wilmut announced that he would abandon the somatic cell nuclear transfer technology used to create Dolly, favoring the reprogramming research developed by Shinya Yamanaka, which converts somatic cells into stem cells without using eggs. Wilmut believed that reprogramming technology held greater potential for treating degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease, as well as stroke and heart attack patients.

However, Wilmut's team's creation of Dolly sparked full-scale animal cloning research and raised hopes for developing treatments for aging-related diseases like Parkinson's. The British BBC praised Wilmut's work as "laying the foundation for stem cell research."

The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland announced that Dr. Wilmut passed away on the 10th (local time) after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. He was 79 years old. He retired from the University of Edinburgh in 2012 and publicly disclosed his Parkinson's diagnosis in 2018.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.