Dolly the Sheep
Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh · 1996 to 2003
Standing calmly in her glass case, with a slightly startled expression and a coat that is whiter than most sheep you will meet on a Scottish hillside, is the most famous sheep in the world. Dolly was born on the fifth of July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, just a few miles south of this museum, and she was the first mammal ever cloned from an adult body cell. Her existence proved something that many biologists had thought impossible: that a fully specialised cell from a grown animal could be reset and used to grow an entirely new individual. She was named, with a touch of laboratory humour, after the singer Dolly Parton, because the cell that made her came from a mammary gland.
Look at the display around her. The scientists took a cell from the udder of a six year old Finn Dorset ewe, removed the nucleus from an egg cell of a Scottish Blackface sheep, and fused the two together with a tiny electrical pulse. The reconstructed egg was then placed in a surrogate mother. It took two hundred and seventy seven attempts to produce one living lamb. Dolly's white face and her genetic identity came entirely from the donor cell, not from the Blackface surrogate that carried her, which was the visible proof that the cloning had worked. She lived at Roslin, had six lambs of her own, and became a media celebrity visited by film crews from around the world.
Dolly died in February 2003, aged six, after developing a lung disease common in sheep kept indoors. Her body was preserved by taxidermists and given to the museum, where she went on display that same year. Her turntable case lets you walk right around her. She matters because the technique used to create her opened the door to stem cell research and to the reprogramming of adult cells, work that later won a Nobel Prize for other scientists. One memorable detail: when her birth was announced in 1997, the Roslin switchboard was so overwhelmed that staff had to take turns answering calls from journalists.
Did You Know? Dolly was one of two hundred and seventy seven attempts, and the only one that resulted in a living lamb.
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