On July 5, 1996 (often celebrated on July 3 too because of when she was conceived), inside a quiet research building at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, a fluffy white lamb wobbled to her feet. Her name was Dolly, and she looked completely ordinary. But Dolly wasn't ordinary at all. She had been made from a single cell taken from the udder of an adult sheep, making her the first mammal ever cloned from an adult body cell. Scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell led the team that pulled off this jaw-dropping feat.
To make Dolly, the team took a cell from a six-year-old Finn-Dorset ewe and slipped its DNA into an empty egg cell from another sheep. After a tiny zap of electricity, the cell started dividing like a normal embryo. They placed it inside a surrogate mother sheep, and 148 days later, Dolly was born. She was named after country singer Dolly Parton, as a cheeky nod to the cell she came from. Out of 277 tries, only Dolly survived to adulthood.
Dolly lived for six and a half years, had six lambs of her own, and became the world's most famous sheep. Her birth sparked huge conversations about cloning - should we do it with other animals? With people? Today, scientists clone endangered species, livestock, and even pets, and the techniques pioneered with Dolly have helped lead to stem-cell treatments that may one day cure diseases. One little lamb, big huge science.
