Word: embryologists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...closing years of this millennium, a quiet, unassuming British embryologist named Ian Wilmut set out to improve the productivity of farm animals and along the way set off a biological earthquake. The experiment he tenaciously pursued--to get a cell from an adult mammal to behave like a cell from a developing embryo--had long since been abandoned at the major centers of scientific research. Even high school biology students knew that once a mammalian cell had differentiated, and was programmed by nature to be bone or nerve or skin, it could not be deprogrammed...
...WILMUT became the world's best-known embryologist in early 1997, when he and his team at Scotland's Roslin Institute announced that they had cloned a mammal, a lamb named Dolly, from the single cell of an adult sheep. But the science that produced Dolly also gave rise to disquieting questions that still rattle ethicists and policymakers. Managing editor Walter Isaacson met Wilmut at the annual Forstmann Little seminar in Aspen, Colo., last September and engaged him in a lively conversation on the ethics of cloning. "Wilmut expressed his concern that the breakthrough he had wrought would be used...
...mother, sparked a worldwide debate over the moral and medical implications of cloning. Several U.S. states and European countries have banned the cloning of human beings, yet South Korean scientists claimed last month that they had already taken the first step. In the following essay for TIME, embryologist Wilmut, who led the team that brought Dolly to life at Scotland's Roslin Institute, explains why he believes the debate over cloning people has largely missed the point...
...year and a half since Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut presented Dolly, the cloned sheep, to an astonished world, ethicists and policymakers have been struggling with the unsettling implications of his research. Could scientists use Wilmut's method to clone not just sheep but also billionaires, basketball players and bodies grown for spare parts? Should medical entrepreneurs be allowed to pursue cloning wherever it leads? Or should the government step in now and outlaw it before it starts...
Extraordinary claims, scientists like to say, require extraordinary proof, and none has been more extraordinary in recent years than Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut's claim that he and his colleagues had cloned a sheep named Dolly from a mammary cell of a pregnant ewe. More than a year later, nobody has managed to reproduce the Dolly experiment, and Wilmut is under growing pressure to prove that his famous sheep is what he says she is. Last week at a genetics meeting at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, he blandly conceded that there was a "remote possibility" that there could...