I’ll see ewe again!
Creators of Dolly the sheep were ‘bombarded’ by people begging them to clone their lost loved ones
IT WAS a discovery that turned the scientific world on its head – and put a humble sheep at the centre of a biological revolution.
But now it has emerged that scientists behind Dolly the pioneering clone were bombarded with appeals from grieving people wanting them to ‘resurrect’ their departed loved ones.
Dolly was born at The Roslin Institute in Midlothian in 1996. She was the first mammal ever to be cloned using a cell taken from an adult animal – proving that cells from anywhere in the body could be used to ‘fertilise’ a specially-prepared egg.
The groundbreaking achievement was controversial, however, as some felt the team’s success potentially opened the door to cloning humans.
A new BBC Scotland documentary, ‘Dolly: The Sheep that Changed the World’, to be shown tonight, reveals Roslin was ‘overwhelmed by requests’ from the public, including some tragic pleas to bring back lost loved ones.
Dr Ron James, who was managing director of PPL Therapeutics, the firm behind Dolly, said: ‘We had a letter which said a chap’s girlfriend had died a couple of weeks before he was due to get married and could we clone her.
‘The answer is, theoretically it might be possible but you’re going to get a baby 18 or 20 years younger than your girlfriend was.’
Despite Graham Bullfield, the director of Roslin, condemning human cloning, questions continued and US President Clinton even called for the world to ‘resist the temptation to replicate ourselves’.
The hour-long programme examines Dolly’s story 25 years on, told in depth for the first time by the scientists who created her.
John Bracken, senior large animal technician at Roslin Institute, tells the programme how special the animal was, even before it was born.
He recalls: ‘Every time we would scan the ewe to see whether the pregnancy was still viable, we would immediately have to phone and say “the pregnancy is progressing as would be normal”.’
Dolly died aged six on February 14, 2003 after being diagnosed with lung disease.
Professor Bruce Whitelaw, group leader in animal biotechnology at the time, said: ‘It was like losing part of the team.’
The famous sheep is now stuffed and mounted in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.