Word: wilmut
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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 did it. From a single mammary cell, taken from an adult ewe, he and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute cloned a sheep called Dolly and introduced her to a skeptical world in February...
...event, he seemed as surprised as anyone else that his modest and eerily simple experiment, conducted with limited funding, should have as much impact on our sense of what it is to be human as anything since Adam and Eve. Wilmut wanted to use his cloning technology to improve livestock. "I think we should trust the farmers," he said. Any experimentation with humans, he believed, should be kept strictly at the level of cells and proteins. It would be ethically unacceptable, he said, to use his technique to create a human clone...
That, however, was the very thing that caught the world's imagination. Human cloning! The stuff of science fiction seemed about to become reality. Even before other labs had confirmed Wilmut's discovery, a Harvard-trained physicist named Richard Seed proclaimed his intention to clone humans for commercial purposes. Cloning, he declared grandiosely, was "the first serious step toward becoming one with...
...course, you are setting out to make the sheep ill to study the disease," Wilmut said. "This is acceptable provided that the animal gets the same treatment a human [with the disease] would...