Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 32, 2008



Dolly the ewe (July 5, 1996 – February 14, 2003) was the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was born on July 5, 1996 and she lived until the age of six.

The cell used as the donor for the cloning of Dolly was taken from a mammary gland, and the production of a healthy clone therefore proved that a cell taken from a specific body part could recreate a whole individual. More specifically, the production of Dolly showed that mature differentiated somatic cells in an adult animal's body could under some circumstances revert back to an undifferentiated pluripotent form and then develop into any part of an animal. As Dolly was cloned from part of a mammary gland, she was named after the famously busty country western singer Dolly Parton.

Dolly was the end result of a long research program funded by the British government at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. This used the technique of Somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the cell nucleus from an adult cell is transferred into an unfertilized oocyte (developing egg cell) that has had its nucleus removed. The hybrid cell is then stimulated to divide by an electric shock, and when it develops into a blastocyst it is implanted in a surrogate mother.