Word: wilmut
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Dolly is a carbon copy of her mother, grown from a cell taken from an adult ewe's mammary gland. The father, in a sense, is embryologist Ian Wilmut, who as a boy wanted to be a farmer but, after a summer of laboratory work, became enchanted by the magical progression of embryos from amorphous balls of cells into living entities of exquisite complexity. In the pursuit of the advancement of animal husbandry (and, by extension, human nutrition and health), he began experimenting with cloning at Scotland's Roslin Institute. His vision was the creation of genetically engineered farm animals...
...same trick that enabled scientists to clone Dolly could one day be used to clone a human being, a possibility Wilmut finds dismaying. The father of three argues that it is every child's birthright to be regarded as unique, not a counterfeit version of someone whose strengths and shortcomings have been revealed. The President of the U.S. and the Pontiff in Rome sounded alarms. Laws were debated; ethical questions raised; scientists were hauled before legislative panels and warned not to trespass on human territory. But how can one un-know science? The issue is one posed by Blake long...
This year's list of nominees was typically eclectic. Should we honor the Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut and his immortal cloned sheep Dolly? What about Tiger Woods' thrilling 350-yd. drives into history? Or Alan Greenspan's steady-on-the-tiller stewardship of America's ongoing economic boom? Or--of course--the life and death of Diana, Princess of Wales...
...Slack tells the BBC, "Imagine reprogramming an egg in such a way that it didn't form a whole embryo but it just formed the organ you wanted, plus the heart and circulatory system." Yes, this is no mad science, but simply organ transplant research ? just as Dr. Ian Wilmut originally cloned Dolly the sheep to create a better glass of milk...
...even Wilmut fell short (so to speak) of the standard set in 1953 by Watson and Crick, whose own Nature paper announcing the most important scientific discovery of the half-century--the structure of DNA--ran just over one page...