Ian Wilmut

Ian Wilmut
Born	1944-07-07 Hampton Lucy, England
Alma mater	University of Nottingham, Cambridge
Awards	1997 Time man of the year runner up
Scientific career
Fields	embryologist

Prof. Sir Ian Wilmut OBE (born July 7 1944) is an English embryologist and is currently one of the leaders of the Queen's Medical Research Institute 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 1996. He was granted an OBE in 1999 for services to embryo development. In December 2007 it was announced that he would be knighted in the 2008 New Year Honours.

Dolly was a bonus--sometimes when scientists work hard, they also get lucky, and that's what happened.

Biography

Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire), England, and became interested in biology while working as a farmhand.

His father, Leonard Wilmut, was a maths teacher who had a severe case of diabetes that caused blindness. Wilmut met Christopher Polge, who had discovered cryopreservation in 1949, and became fascinated with the research. He earlier desired to embark on a naval career, but was unable to do so because of his colour blindness. After attending the University of Nottingham for his undergraduate degree, Wilmut was awarded a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1971; his subsequent research led to the birth of the first calf from a frozen embryo — "Frosty" — in 1973.

Steen Willadsen, at Cambridge, England, was the first to clone a mammal from differentiated cells, from sheep embryos, in 1984.

http://library.thinkquest.org/24355/data/details/1984.html

http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=RDv17n2_PA.pdf

In 1995, 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.

It has been reported that Wilmut is abandoning cloning in light of Shinya Yamanaka's work on induced pluripotent stem cells.

He was knighted in the 2008 New Year Honours. It has been reported that the Queen has been petitioned to deny Wilmut's honour.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1512377/I-didn%27t-clone-Dolly-the-sheep%2C-says-prof.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3285475.ece

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/dolly-scientist-should-be-stripped-of-his-knighthood-colleagues-tell-queen-776746.html

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=400407&c=1

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2008/02/arise-sir-keith.html

He was a student of the former Boy's High School, in Scarborough, where his father taught.

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.. 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. 1-33%) as other people, in addition to Keith Campbell, did some of the work.

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,"

References

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1512377/I-didn%27t-clone-Dolly-the-sheep%2C-says-prof.html

External links

• Newsletter, Center for Genetics and Society
• Dolly Scientist Joins The University of Edinburgh