If all the world seemed head over heels with excitement about the first animal to be cloned from an adult, Ian Wilmut, head of the team that created Dolly, was hardly transported by his newfound fame. "You'll all be gone by tomorrow," he said to reporters with a wave of his hand. Perhaps so, but the issues raised by Dolly certainly won't be.
Scientists had successfully cloned plants and even mammals from embryos. But most assumed cloning mature animals would always be the stuff of science fiction. The DNA in mature cells, they believed, could no longer run the genetic program immature DNA uses to produce whole organisms. But Wilmut, 52, and his team of researchers, toiling in obscurity, have proved them wrong and catapulted biogenetics into a future no one seems quite prepared for.
Despite the vast scientific leap their bleating lamb represents, Wilmut and his researchers at the Roslin Institute, outside Edinburgh, kept Dolly's July birth under wraps for seven months while they completed a scientific paper on their study. When Dolly was finally introduced, she rocked the world of science to its foundations. "This is huge," exclaims Dr. Lee Silver, a Princeton University biology professor. "It shatters what we thought was true about biology."
Some scientists were exhilarated by the potential for creating, for instance, a race of super-productive cows, genetically engineered pigs to become organ donors for humans or even fresh brigades of endangered animals; others worried about cloning's dark side. "We need a national commission on genetics and parenthood," says Glenn McGee, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Just as in fictional scenarios like the Hitlercloning 1978 thriller The Boys from Brazil or the 1996 comedy Multiplicity, it's easy to imagine how insanity or ambition might overwhelm good sense or morality.
"There are enormous questions we haven't thought about," notes Nigel Cameron, head of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill. "It's only a matter of time and money before someone does it to a human. But part of our notion of human dignity is that we are different. Cloning humans diminishes the dignity in all of us."
Wilmut, for one, agrees, dismissing human-cloning scenarios as "ghastly" and "appalling." He prefers to focus on the positive side of his discovery. "The most important thing is to be as responsible as you can," he says. "But the advantages this brings will be enormous."
Wilmut has long pursued those advantages. Although previous studies seemed to show that a mature mammal's genetic material could no longer grow and divide like the immature cells of an embryo, Wilmut's team discovered that if they rendered a cell's DNA temporarily dormant by immersing the cell in a special chemical bath and then implanted it into an egg stripped of its own genetic material, the egg's nutrients would kick-start the cell's DNA to develop a new organism. After a number of failed attempts to hatch a cloned sheep, the egg carrying Dolly thrived, and last summer a ewe acting as surrogate mother gave birth to the first mammal without a biological father.
The son of a math teacher and a housewife, Wilmut grew up in the English Midlands city of Coventry, studied agricultural science at Nottingham University, then earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge on the topic of freezing boar semen. He did postdoctoral research on frozen embryos, then joined the Roslin Institute in 1974. The father of three grown children—including a daughter who works as a molecular geneticist in Norway—Wilmut kicks back by working in the garden ("anything but brussels sprouts") or in a friendly game of curling, a sort of shuffleboard on ice. These diversions will get more time now that he has decided to cut back on what had become a marathon work schedule. "I realized you can kill yourself doing that," he says. As for worrying himself to death about his discovery, that's hardly likely. "We all have concerns about this being misused," he concedes, "but I don't have sleepless nights. I believe we are a moral species."
PETER AMES CARLIN
NINA A. BIDDLE in Roslin, and bureau reports
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