Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
HIDE AND SHEEP
Bid to kidnap Dolly the clone ends in ‘disaster’ for confused activists
DOLLY the sheep was the target of a bungled kidnap plot by activists, one of the raiders has revealed.
Campaigners broke into a shed where the first clone of an adult mammal was kept, only to find it full of sheep.
Raider Mark Lynas, 44, admitted it was impossible to single out Dolly and he and three others fled empty-handed.
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Mike Mitchell, then 18, took 400 to animal cloning. Dolly had caused a sensation when she was born in 1996 and in autumn 1998 they headed to her home at Roslin Institute in Midlothian.
Lynas once led the UK action against “frankenfoods”, as critics dubbed genet- snaps in Washington and Baltimore, US, in 1964. Just 46 of them sold for £224,000 in 2011. The full set will be auctioned in Liverpool on March 24. ically modified organisms, but has since ditched those beliefs.
He revealed in his new book, Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong on GMOS, that he gained access to the institute and its layout by posing as a researcher. At night the raiders entered the shed, only to find: “Disaster! All sheep look more or less the same. Cloned sheep, pretty much by definition, look even more the same. The scientists outfoxed us by hiding Dolly in plain sight.” Dolly had six lambs and lived at Roslin until she died in 2003.