Opinion: The morally ground-shifting legacy of Ian Wilmut and Dolly the sheep
Ian Wilmut, the British scientist behind the first-ever cloning of a mammal, died Sept. 10, leaving behind a twofold legacy.
Ian Wilmut, the British scientist behind the first-ever cloning of a mammal, died Sept. 10, leaving behind a twofold legacy. One part is groundbreaking science. Creating Dolly required a combination of genome manipulation and reproductive tools that helped launch what is sometimes called “reprogenetics,” a basket of reproductive and genetic technologies that allow for greater control over human procreation and generated work that ranges from human-animal chimeras to the “de-extinction” of mammoths. By demonstrating that differentiated adult cells could be forced by the right chemical signals to become pluripotent stem cells, Wilmut’s work also provided the basis for Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel Prize-winning work.
Besides being groundbreaking science, Dolly was morally ground-shifting. Perhaps more than any other biotech advance, Dolly symbolized growing human power over nature. But the Dolly project was deeply troubling to most observers. Kept a close secret by the Roslin Institute and initially disclosed in a media leak in 1997, about eight months after her birth, Dolly caught everyone by surprise. At the same time, genetically modified crops were being rolled out quickly and quietly into the market. Collectively, there was a sense that the science was way ahead of the ethics. It looked like we were on the verge of being able to do whatever we wanted with living matter, and we all needed to talk about what we wanted.
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