On Sunday, 23rd of February, 1997, the world woke up to events
in the sleepy Scottish village of Rosaline, near Edinburgh.
Overnight, it became the epicentre of one of the 20th century's most
stunning scientific breakthroughs.
# Never met a girl like you before...#
Scientists in Scotland have produced the first-ever clone
of an adult animal.
We had the UK government calling and we had the Pope's office calling.
We had, you know, the White House calling.
Suddenly this story had legs.
In fact, I suppose it had four, rather furry legs.
This is the behind the scenes story of Dolly the Sheep, told in depth
for the first time by the scientists who created her.
I did run down to the bar, ordered around a drinks for everybody
that was there and said, "I'm a Dad!"
Frenetic... A bit manic, really.
It's the story of how Dolly was made, using techniques
previously thought impossible.
What we're doing now is tinkering with the stuff of life directly.
When some of the most controversial research ever seen...
We must resist the temptation to replicate ourselves.
..promised miraculous cures for deadly diseases.
Eventually, we can replace failing organs in many different diseases
that we currently can't treat.
It's an untold story from the lab
that's stranger than science fiction...
I got a shout out from Dolly Parton at a concert in Glasgow,
and she did her, you know, 'BAAAD' publicity joke.
With dark plot twists...
Fires at two animal research centres were started deliberately.
And we had security assistants, big dogs patrolling the site at night.
..and unexpected heroes.
We didn't have any lovely temperature controlled incubators,
so my solution, I would tuck it under my bra strap.
We had no money and we needed four million.
I guess we surprised folk, and we enjoyed that.
Take that!
Dolly was created at the Roslin Institute.
Today, the institute sits amongst the top research laboratories
in the world.
But it was a very different story back in 1997.
It was an unfancied lab which wasn't, you know, on the world
map of developmental biology.
One of the first questions I was asked, Where is Roslin?
The Roslin Institute was largely unknown outside the UK,
but it did have a rising star in animal breeding, Ian Wilmut.
The revolution, which has been going through our institutes
in the past ten years or so, is that we're now able to move
inside the cell and begin to study these characteristics
at the level of the gene.
Alongside Ian Wilmut stood Keith Campbell, a specialist in cell
technology, with his crazy theory that might bring Dolly to life.
When I had these thoughts when they came together,
I was actually sitting at the computer, but I often sit
at the computer, typing away, thinking of other things.
Their combined talents achieved success against all the odds,
because Roslin was supposed to be a no-frills, agricultural
research institute with a simple goal.
It was one of the research institutes set up
after the Second World War, which was about basically
feeding the nation, improving agricultural productivity.
Big improvements in milk production.
Big improvements in the amount of meat you get from a pig.
But they were run by the government, financed by government.
To a large extent, the directors of the institutes
decided what should be done with the money.
But in 1979, a change in government signified big changes
for these institutes, who now had to pay their own way.
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony,
and where there is despair, may we bring hope.
But in the 1980s, the Thatcherite era, suddenly these institutes
were asked, how do you contribute to the, you know, the GDP,
basically, what's your economic payoff?
And some of them found it difficult to answer that.
In 1981, the government axe was wielded.
Many of the institutes were to be closed.
A government inspector sat down with Grahame Bulfield,
the recently appointed director of Roslin, to deliver his verdict.
We just made the cut.
We were the institute above the cut, all the institutes below us
have been closed and he said to me, "So you better do
"something about it."
The scientists needed a Plan B.
They had to follow the money.
The path led to the most lucrative and unsettling science
on the planet, genetic engineering.
The code for life.
Scientists can now begin to read that code and to alter
it, using new techniques known as genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering had accelerated since the discovery of DNA's double
helix in the early 1950s.
This allowed scientists to manipulate the building
blocks of life.
In the early '80s, scientists took a growth gene from a rat
and injected it into a mouse egg.
The results? Gigantic mice.
The press called them super mice.
These are two mice, as you can see, there's a difference in size.
The large animal has rat growth hormone gene in it.
You can see she's easily twice as big as her sister.
This little girl is harder to catch.
In America, it wasn't just giant mice...
..but growth hormones were being used in livestock too.
Were giant steaks next on the menu?
These early steps into a brave new world led to public alarm.
What would happen if we manipulated human eggs to put a gene
in like this, we could have everyone could be a great basketball player.
People say you're playing God, all this sort of stuff.
But genetic engineering also promised huge advances in the fight
against human suffering.
It was now possible to pinpoint specific genetic mutations that made
us vulnerable to disease.
Roslin chose to join the crusade to find treatments for the most
crippling genetic disorders, like motor neurone disease
and Parkinson's disease.
For some in the team, the work was deeply personal.
Being born with spina bifida, I knew things can go wrong
when embryos develop.
And so there was definitely an interest in...
..what could...what could be done to alleviate these problems?
The scientists chose to focus on a genetic disorder
that attacks the lungs.
Cystic fibrosis is a degenerative disease that usually starts
in young children.
Many sufferers are only expected to live until about 50.
It's caused by a single gene's inability to produce a vital
protein, leading to excess fluid building up in the lungs.
Another protein, Alpha-1-Antitrypsin,
was seen as a way of helping the lungs fight
the symptoms of this mutation.
They would breed genetically engineered sheep and use them
as living drug factories.
You might be thinking why sheep?
It's because they were cheap, you know,
a sheep cost like the same as a pint of beer,
or a bottle of posh fizzy water in a hotel.
Roslin saw an opportunity to prosper.
If they combined their expertise in animal breeding
with genetic engineering.
Professor Bruce Whitelaw was a young geneticist recruited to work
in Roslin's new team.
I'm what's called a gene jockey.
I move bits of DNA around and between genes and animals.
We could take genes which we had manipulated in cell culture
and put those genes into an animal.
Bruce's plan was to put a human gene into a fertilised sheep's egg.
The egg was then placed back into the surrogate ewe.
If the lamb born was a girl, then he hoped it would produce
the human protein Alpha-1-antitrypsin in its milk.
Milk's renewable, it's continually produced by the animal,
you can milk the animal and you can purify the protein from it.
You could do it in mice, but you'd have to milk an awful lot
of mice to get enough protein.
The idea of doing it in sheep was overwhelming.
And that's what we did.
First, Alan Archibald had to ensure that the human gene would integrate
with the right gene in the sheep.
The thing with making gene constructs is it looks astonishingly
easy on paper, you can draw the diagrams, you say, "I'll take
"this piece and I'll glue it to that piece."
But, yeah, it's not uncommon for it not to work.
The next step was to inject the genes
into a fertilised sheep's egg.
The process was called pro-nuclear injection,
and it required a steady hand and the patience of a saint.
Bill Ritchie was a natural.
That's the number one of 18.
It was something I was quite good at.
I'm quite good at seeing things in three dimensions.
I used to use a shotgun as well.
So you've got that hand eye coordination.
You could say I was the right person there at the right time.
In with the pipette.
Bill injected human DNA into the nucleus of a sheep's egg.
As the cell in the egg began to divide,
you hoped that the human DNA would be adopted into the sheep DNA
inside the embryo.
It was demanding and delicate work.
You're looking through a microscope.
The diameter of the holding pipette is just a little bit
bigger than a hair.
It's not something you do after a heavy night drinking, anyway.
This is not a good one.
This is what you call sod's law, of course.
You can't touch them with the end of your pipette
because you just squish them.
So the idea is, you kind of blow on them, if you like.
And fingers crossed.
Yeah, that's really what we want.
The work was frustrating.
Lambs were born, but they produced little or none
of the human protein alpha-1-antitrypsin in their milk.
But the team persisted and in 1990 they achieved a huge breakthrough.
A sheep was born that finally delivered the milk for Roslin.
She was called Tracy.
Tracy was pretty much the most famous sheep in the world
before Dolly came along, but it was an absolute milestone
in showing that you could turn a sheep into a living drug factory.
The amount of protein we were producing, actually,
in Tracy was spectacular.
Tracy was producing 35g of alpha-1-antitrypsin
in one litre of her milk.
Compared to a couple of grams produced by the human body.
The team had a great product, but how could this be transformed
into a drug and sold on the open market?
What they really needed was an organic chemist,
turned venture capitalist.
Ron James was tempted North to run a spin-off company called PPL.
Roslin had the science, but they couldn't commercialise it,
as such, because they're an academic research institute.
I think the attraction was using the science to try and help people
in some way or other.
The second thing would be to make some money, of course.
I must say they look in good condition.
Our sheep, a little furry factory's walking around in fields,
and they do a superb job.
This is a litre of milk from one of our sheep.
That is the amount of protein that would be contained
in this litre of milk.
And they do it very cheaply.
The team at Roslin was on a high.
Their mission to find treatments for genetic disorders
was bang on course, but their use of animals for research
was condemned by campaigners.
This technology can cause incredible suffering to animals,
we know that.
These scientists should ask themselves, not, can we do this?
But should we be doing this at all?
The process that we're using doesn't do the animals any harm at all.
And the view of the man in the street,
really, is that if we're doing this kind of thing for health care
reasons, then they're not particularly concerned about it.
But some animal rights activists went far beyond protest.
Fire chiefs in Scotland have warned that fires at two animal research
centres near Edinburgh, both could have been the work
of animal rights activists.
Ourselves and the Hill Farming Research Institute
were firebombed on the same day.
Somebody had broken in.
And I think it was like a hot iron or something,
it was plugged in and then they'd left it with a timer
and that had gone and caused a fire.
The senior scientist went ex-directory and we had security
systems put in place.
Big dogs patrolling the site at night.
I do remember the army coming along and teaching us how to check
under our cars for bombs.
But the team was undeterred.
The value of individual animals versus value of humans.
If science leads to treatments of life-threatening diseases,
then I think, you know, robust, reproducible science is very,
very much justified in that.
Despite the personal risks, the team had an immediate challenge
to overcome... There was only one Tracy.
And the method used to create her was hugely inefficient.
You were literally injecting a gene into an embryo and then hoping
that it would be taken up in the genetic code of the embryo.
And the only way to get the right result was to inject
1,000, 2,000 embryos.
But it was a very crude process of genetic modification they used.
Incredibly hit and miss.
What was needed was a flock of Tracys.
And someone already had the solution.
Ian Wilmut believed the quickest way to fill a field full
of protein-producing sheep like Tracy was not to breed them,
but to create exact genetic copies of them, better known as cloning.
Ian Wilmut was entering a controversial field of science
where some giants of biology had spent decades gradually laying
the foundations of this dark art.
Back in the early '60s, you had John Gurdon in Oxford.
I seem to remember an image of all these albino frogs
laid out with clones.
The Chinese then cloned a carp in 1963.
And then in Cambridge in 1984, a Danish scientist,
Steen Willadsen, made another huge stride in cloning.
This extrovert Dane, it was he who actually cloned
the first sheep a decade earlier, and actually had done
a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of developing the techniques
to do mammal cloning.
Whereas Steen Willadsen and the others before him had only
ever succeeded in cloning cells from embryos,
Ian Wilmut and the team at Roslin were about to embark on a challenge
previously unimaginable...
..Creating clones from adult cells.
It began to occur to me that it would be possible to use
cloning as a way of introducing precise genetic changes
into the livestock, we could get together the team to develop
this technique of cloning.
The prevailing scientific wisdom was that cloning could only
be completed using young embryonic cells.
In creating Dolly, Ian Wilmut would achieve what was thought
to be impossible..
..Creating a new life from a fully developed adult cell.
To achieve this, he needed help.
His ideal candidate was a young cell biologist
called Keith Campbell.
He was kind of like the mad scientist,
you know, that mad professor.
He even had the hairstyle to go with it, actually.
He wasn't the best hands on, he was the brains of the unit,
let's say that... He also made a mean cup of coffee.
And when I saw this opportunity at Roslin, I sort of tried to grab
it with two hands, and as luck would have it, here I am.
It was in early 1996 when the team began the cloning experiment
that would lead to Dolly.
The plan was to follow the methods that had succeeded in the past.
This involved using young embryo cells which were considered
the most suitable for cloning.
But the experiment started badly.
News from the lab was that the embryo cells had taken
a turn for the worse.
On one particular day, the cells that were due to come to us,
had gone down, whether it was infection or what?
I'm not quite sure, but it was actually Keith Campbell who said,
"Well, we could try these cells that we have on the go."
But these were adult differentiated cells.
Really? You know, how's that going to work?
Life begins with one cell, then that cell starts to divide
into two, then four, then eight, then 16, and keeps going
into the trillions that comprise a human or even a sheep.
Along the way, some of these cells begin to differentiate and form
cells such as liver cells, heart cells, hair cells are skin cells.
My degree course taught me, you know, once a cell has become
differentiated, that's it, you can't kick start it back.
But Keith was convinced it could.
Instead of only using early cells in the embryo
that hadn't begun to specialise, Keith was convinced
he could clone a sheep with any of the trillions of cells in its body.
They all had the ability to be reprogrammed
and kick started into new life.
It had been written by scientists that this was an impossible task.
I don't believe anything's impossible.
I think some things are improbable.
I've been working on this for six years and sometimes I even dream it.
Well, Campbell was a bit of a genius, really.
Traditional idea of the geniuses, is a little bit maverick
and not quite at the mainstream.
But Keith has these leaps of the dark.
You know, a guy who could imagine how things might work
and then had the courage and the technique to try it out.
Keith's unique understanding of the life cycle of cells meant
he was able to see that it might be possible to use an adult cell
to clone a new animal.
To do this, he needed to starve the sales into a sleep-like state,
where they do almost nothing.
The state is called quiescence.
Quiescence is a cell cycle phase, which has been ignored,
really, for a lot of years.
What the cell is doing with its genetic material is getting
it ready to maybe specialise into another direction
or into another cell type.
Keith Campbell forced these cells into quiescence by putting them
on a starvation diet.
He starved the cells of growth components
because he was mean to them.
They stopped at a point, and that point turned out
to be very convenient for this transfer technology.
Once the adult cells were starved into quiescence,
they were handed into Bill Ritchie's lab.
This wasn't a one man job.
He had been joined by Karen Walker, an embryologist
who was sharing the workload.
Bill, is someone that I still call a friend.
He was very much, "And you will do it my way, and you won't do
"it any other way, and I don't care how you did it before."
I've known Karen a long time.
You know, we complimented each other, and in many ways.
He had his set up, which was very Heath Robinson.
He used to spend so much time in his "cupboard"...
erm, or his... No, I should call it his "laboratory,"
but essentially it was a cupboard.
One of my first jobs that Bill made me do was make my own pipettes.
You'd have to get it the right diameter, you have to break them.
You then have to grind them to get the right angle.
It was torturous.
With pipettes prepared, the work on the cells began.
But this wasn't the same process used to create Tracy, where genes
were injected directly into a sheep's egg.
Bill and Karen now had to perfect a new process.
This was cloning, the nucleus from a sheep's egg was removed
and replaced with one of Keith's quiescent adult cells.
It was called nuclear transfer.
The process of nuclear transfer, it's exciting.
However, the reality of it is, it's extremely boring.
It's very, very repetitive.
Nuclear transfer itself is very simple.
You take an egg...
You'd use this pipette to swivel it around in order to find the DNA
that you wanted to take out.
And so then you were able to suck that.
But this is where the trickiest bit was...
You'd have to nip it off.
It would be, it's like pizza dough, so that you made that membrane
that was around there, seal back up again.
You take a cell, which contains the nucleus with the DNA
that you're interested in.
And then you'd pop the cell back in.
What you wanted to do was snuggle them in together.
I know that sounds bizarre, but it was, it was like taking two
bean bags and kind of smooching them in.
Karen would apply an electric current.
Karen was very good at fusing them together.
The two fused together allows the embryo
to actually start developing.
It's a numbers game to get the success at the end, to actually
put hooves on the ground.
At every step as you go through, you lose some.
You literally would see them explode.
They'd all kind of come gushing out.
Bill and Karen needed a production line of eggs.
Without eggs, the experiments would grind to a halt.
That's what made the workers at Dryden Farm another vital
link in the chain.
John Bracken was an animal anaesthetist.
He'd worked on farms since he was a boy.
He made sure the sheep were content and producing a good amount of eggs.
Sheep are not probably as intelligent as some other species,
but I just have a sort of an affinity with them,
and I just like working with them.
At just the right moment, John took the sheep into surgery
to collect their unfertilised eggs, or oocytes.
We would deliver the oocytes that we'd collected from surgery
through to Bill, and then take them back up to the main institute
to do the nuclear transfers.
The best part of the job, perhaps, was being able to go down
to the farm to collect embryos and bring them back up.
The large animal facility was good ten-minute walk down the road.
What you ideally want to do is maintain a nice,
constant temperature.
However, we didn't have any lovely, fancy temperature-controlled
incubators that were mobile or anything.
So my solution was to... It was little 2.5 mil Eppendorf.
I would tuck it under my bra strap, fetch them back to the lab,
we do our manipulations, anything that we thought
was going to become an embryo I'd tuck in my bra strap
and they'd go back down to the farm again.
The good embryos fertilised by Karen in the lab
were then implanted into surrogate sheep.
It was fingers crossed that a pregnancy would follow.
Time and again, the pregnancies failed, so the hard work
at the lab resumed.
It was always at the back of your mind that you needed
a good collection of oocytes sites and you were always looking
to hear how many embryos were going to come down
to be transferred.
So it was a very, very intense period of work.
We would be there until late into the evening,
and the institute was a kind of quiet, long corridors.
So I was never very keen on being left alone in the institute,
I have to say.
# This is the next century...#
We would sit in the cupboard in the dark for hours on end
with the radio on, we were like an old married couple.
# How we like to sing along...#
The amount of work which goes to actually do it was
a huge amount of work.
Because if somebody swivelled a chair to move a dish
of embryos or something, you know, it could be carnage,
you'd have had wipe out.
Rotate it, have another go.
After two months of long days and longer nights,
the 8th of February 1996 is an unforgettable day for Karen.
The day we made Dolly, Bill was on the rig
and I was on the fusion machine.
When you're busy doing something like this, I don't think
you think, "Oh, all right, you know, this could be it."
The electric current that's going to go through is actually
punching holes through these two pieces of membrane
that are together.
Sometimes you push that button, it was having an off day,
and it would just explode and you'd have the whole,
"That's gone again." Or "Ah", and one of the most
satisfying things to see.
You'd see the cell almost merge.
That feeling of satisfaction, of knowing
that you've had a successful fusion.
And it's the bit I did with Dolly.
And that's why Bill and I joke that I'm Dolly's dad
and he's Dolly's mum, because that electro fusion part
is essentially how the sperm would fuse with an egg,
if it was a normal fertilisation.
One of the questions I've always been asked was, you know,
what did you think when you meet Dolly?
Well, putting these embryos into an animal...
..we didn't know whether that was going to succeed or not.
In March 1996, the stars must have aligned above Roslin,
because one of the surrogate sheep was pregnant.
Keith's crazy theory looked like it might succeed
and deliver something miraculous.
This incredible footage shows the earliest images of Dolly.
First time it's ever been seen on TV.
John Bracken was now playing midwife to an unborn scientific marvel.
Every time we would scan the ewe to see whether the pregnancy
was still viable, we would immediately have to phone and say
"The pregnancy is progressing as would be normal."
You realised this was a very special pregnancy.
Tuss, the recipient ewe carrying Dolly, was so important,
we would actually sleep in the surgical unit during the night
to make sure that if she started going into labour,
there was somebody here.
On Friday the 5th July 1996, the sheep carrying Dolly
went into labour
That same day, Karen was attending a wedding in the Highland
village of Plockton.
When she got back to her hotel room, a fax was waiting.
That fax said, "She's been born.
"She has a white face and furry legs.
"Both doing fine."
Now what the girl on reception must have thought,
what kind of baby has got furry legs?
But to me, that meant I knew we had done it right.
Dolly's surrogate mum, a Scottish blackface sheep,
had given birth to a Finn Dorset lamb.
Thanks to the adult Finn Dorset DNA injected into her embryo
by Karen and Bill.
We were present at her birth, and when that Lamb was born,
you could immediately tell that it was a normal lamb.
It was very quick to get up and suckle from its mother,
which is really good news when it's such an important birth.
The figures are always quoted as Dolly being one from 277,
but that was 277 successfully cloned embryos.
Dolly was all about defying the odds.
400 unfertilised eggs were collected.
277 of them were successfully fertilised in the lab.
Only 29 developed into viable embryos.
Only one lamb was born.
Immediate instructions were issued to the
team to keep mum about Dolly's birth,
but Karen couldn't help herself.
I have to admit, actually, that when I saw that fax
under my hotel door, though, I did then run down to the bar.
You know, ordered a round of drinks for everybody
that was there and said, "I'm a dad."
The new lamb came with a name 6LL3, but not for long.
I turned to my colleague and said, "Do you know what?
"We're going to have to call this lamb Dolly after Dolly Parton
"because Dolly was made from mammary cells, and I thought
"that that was just an off the cuff remark
"that would never go any further."
Roslyn knew they were sitting on a hugely
significant scientific advance.
They needed the help of someone who knew how to navigate
the dangerous waters of the global press.
I was what became known as Dolly's PR.
I think my first words were,
"This is really going to hit the media big time."
On February 27th 1997, the tale of Dolly was to have been revealed
in one of the world's most prestigious science journals.
The story was strictly embargoed until then,
but it proved impossible to keep it under wraps.
Someone rang me on the Saturday night.
"It's on the front page of The Observer."
As I got into the office, the phone rang and it was New Zealand.
New Zealand was close to going to bed.
Sheep are very important in New Zealand.
Then the UK woke up, then the US woke up.
It was a very interesting day,
as each of the media swung into action.
All hell broke loose.
We realised on that Monday morning we had to call a press briefing.
We had CNN flying in from the States, for example,
and there were a large number of press people,
so we had them all together at one place.
We weren't ready for the amount of people who turned up.
For the 17 news crews from around the world,
Dolly was the perfect gift -
hard science wrapped in a soft woolly exterior.
People sort of like creature stories.
Sheep - quite sort of likeable creatures.
Dolly became the kind of warm, fuzzy face of that story.
And I think of this obscure Scottish lab, a lot of hair, I seem
to remember, you know, Ian with his beard.
Keith Campbell with his wild locks.
Ian became the face of cloning.
He's not an egotistical person at all.
People found him an affable, friendly, helpful face,
who would patiently explain these details.
There isn't any doubt that this is a technique which offers
new opportunities for making biopharmaceutical products
for research into genetic diseases.
As the press were getting used to the insights of this quiet
and understated Englishman, some sections were left bemused
by the achievement emerging from a place like Roslin.
I mean, I think it was written up in the American press
in particular as being some kind of remote backwater in the middle
of nowhere that did nothing interesting except look at chickens,
and...and that wasn't true.
I mean, Scotland is really quite a civilised country,
as you possibly know.
Dolly, who made her debut for the press today, is a remarkable
sheep, clearly enjoying the attention.
Those who'd met Dolly knew that she was a bit of a character
and a diva, slightly plump sheep, would kind of rush up to see you.
The more people that visited her and gave her treats, she did realise
that she was something special.
And, gosh, did she know she was beautiful.
I could pick her out of any line-up of any sheep.
I swear she, if she'd had a lipstick, she'd have put it on,
ready for the reporters coming in, because she would literally,
you know, fluff herself up.
We actually had a US evening chat show
that wanted to fly Dolly to the US.
What was she going to say? SHE BLEATS
For the public, Dolly was a novelty.
Scientifically, she was a game-changer.
Some people say that Dolly defied the laws of biology -
well, she didn't really. What she did was show
that we didn't understand biology properly.
But there were some who thought the miracle of Dolly
was too good to be true.
Dolly was so big, it was changing dogma.
People didn't want to believe it because it just couldn't happen.
You've got those sleek American glinty-eyed molecular biologists
in these posh east coast laboratories
and you did get a palpable sense
they slightly looked down their noses at the Dolly announcement.
I mean, there were several attacks, questioning whether it was real,
whether the Roslin team had made a mistake and so on.
Could be that Dolly isn't true, that Dolly is true, I don't know.
I never said one way or the other.
I said the evidence that he has provided
does not prove what he says.
Was it accurate? Was it true?
Can you demonstrate to us that Dolly is genetically identical
to the cells from which she was derived?
The tests that were used back then were something akin
to the DNA fingerprinting.
It's not quite the same, but it's very similar.
And the odds are such that, yeah,
if Dolly had been at the scene of the crime,
she would have been convicted.
Along with scepticism, Dolly's announcement to the world was also
greeted with trepidation.
I think the most lurid side of it, which got people really talking,
was about, "What does this mean for cloning people?"
I remember appearing on Jeremy Paxman's evening programme.
I remember him saying...
It doesn't take much for the British to turn a national
achievement into a source of angst, but the case of Dolly, the man-made
sheep, has achieved it overnight.
The obvious benefits to medicine and to curing people
from what we're doing far outweigh the remote possibility that somebody
might misuse it for humans.
But the whole of the Fleet Street press corps cooked up the story,
raising spectres of cloning armies of dictators.
I remember there was a crazy tabloid headline, "Can we raise the dead?"
Well, that could have been a two-letter story - no.
But that didn't stop them.
A meeting of the Science and Technology Select Committee
was hastily organised to deal with the Dolly dilemma.
How easy might it be scientifically for someone somewhere
to apply your method to the cloning of humans?
Wilmut and I went down within a week to be interviewed by them,
and the Government committees were busy trying to see
what this technology was, and they were trying to see
whether the law actually stopped human cloning.
At the moment, the cloning of human beings would not
be allowed under law.
This is still an extremely dangerous technique and it would be grossly
irresponsible to think of using the cloning techniques at present
to produce children on the safety grounds alone.
Of course, if you look at the logistics of making Dolly,
you realise what a horror show human cloning would be.
277 eggs. I mean, just to get 277 eggs from women
would be a very tall order.
Then you've got to find, you know, 29 women who want to be surrogate
mothers with a very high-risk that the pregnancy will fail.
I mean, it was just unthinkable.
Could we face a future of cloned human beings?
Despite Graham Bulfield, the director of Roslin,
condemning human cloning, the interrogations continued.
Medical scientists in particular control the very elements of life and death.
It's not the research itself that should be regulated
because it's very, very difficult to regulate,
but it's the uses of that research.
You see, that's what scientists always say -
they always say science is pure and morally neutral.
It's for society to decide.
The media's relentless focus on human cloning saw Roslin
overwhelmed by requests from the public.
We had a letter which said that a chap's girlfriend
had died a couple of weeks before he was due to get married
and, you know, could we clone her?
And the answer is...
..theoretically, it might be possible, but you're going to get a
tiny baby that's going to be 18 or 20 years younger
than your girlfriend was.
The scientific importance of Dolly was now having an impact
all over the world.
The most powerful man on Earth
wanted to know what was going on at Roslin.
Dolly caught the eye of President Clinton and there was lots of
we need to look at the implications for humans.
The Scottish development has tonight prompted calls
for human cloning to be banned.
Each human life is unique,
born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science.
I believe we must respect this profound gift
and resist the temptation to replicate ourselves.
Humans were now free from the threat of experimentation, but not animals.
That was still too much for some.
Animal rights supporters from all over the country
marched along Whitehall today -
they included disabled people objecting to the use of animal-based
research to help cure their disabilities.
We did get some protesters.
A group of them suggested
that they were going to come to Roslin and, you know,
strip off and make love on the lawn...outside.
Unfortunately, it never happened.
One night in 1998, a group of young activists took direct action.
Dolly was to be liberated.
The activist broke into Dolly's barn, but there was a problem
They couldn't tell which one was Dolly.
Sheepishly, they left empty-handed.
These were exhilarating and eventful times for the team at Roslin,
so, when the Ministry of Agriculture came calling,
there is no need to worry, was there?
I was handed a letter by the chief scientist from the Ministry
of Agriculture, cutting off £700,000 worth of funding.
They said the work had now been done.
Here we were, sitting on really important technology,
and everybody else was only about a year behind us, and we had no money.
So we couldn't afford to be nice and gentlemanly about this.
We had, we had to fight them and we did.
Graham Bulfield knew they were sitting on a gold mine.
What they needed now was a proven deal maker to sell the Dolly
technology to the biggest players in biotech.
I had a reputation for being able to communicate and handle difficult,
controversial science with politicians,
with the media and the public.
For Simon Best, the value in Dolly lay in the ground-breaking
cell technology used to create her.
The Dolly technique will eventually mean that we can replace failing
organs and failing cells in many different diseases that we currently
can't treat. Parkinson's is the classic, you know,
because it's a failure of a very specific cell type.
In Parkinson's, the loss of nerve cells in the part of the brain
called the substantia nigra causes dopamine to reduce - a chemical
responsible for movement and coordination.
What Dolly promised was that a healthy cell, such as an adult
skin cell, could be taken from the patient and reprogrammed
to grow into new dopamine-producing nerve cells and implanted back
into that same part of the brain,
which could be the first step
towards a possible cure for Parkinson's.
And so the medical significance of Dolly was that it was the first
time anyone had shown a technique that in principle could allow
you to produce replacement cells from the patient themselves.
Roslin's technology quickly attracted interest
from around the world.
Geron Corporation in San Francisco were a biotech company
who had millions to spend and wanted the Dolly technology.
We then have plates filled with neurons that could then be used
for a transplantation therapy in Parkinson's -
that's the goal.
And very soon afterwards, a deal was struck.
Everyone was astonished that we got a deal that quickly.
The value of the deal - £30 million.
Dolly had kept the wolves from Roslin's door...
..but she remained blissfully unaware of her value.
Matters of a more intimate nature had been occupying her.
Bonnie was born at 4am on Easter Monday.
Dolly is said to be in good health after a normal delivery
and her lamb is typically sprightly.
It's important from our point of view that it demonstrates
that cloned animals from adult cells are capable of being fertile
and will breed normally.
Dolly mania was relentless.
When it came to Dolly's life, everything was a show stopper.
We had a sheep shearer come in to shear Dolly.
Oh, it was unbelievable.
Very pleased to have the world champion here to shear Dolly today.
And the plan was to take the wool and have it spun and made
into a jumper, and auctioned off in order to raise funds.
And we hope will be useful to treat lung disease,
such as emphysema and cystic fibrosis.
As I was quite close by, and you get little bits that sort of fly off,
and this was one of the little bits that I picked up from the side.
This is an authentic piece of Dolly wool.
Hopefully one day it will end up on the BBC Antiques Roadshow.
Ian and the team continued to clone.
A year after Dolly, they achieved their original goal.
They produced Polly and her sisters - cloned sheep like Dolly.
Three identical Pollys have been cloned
at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh.
But these sheep had also been genetically altered to produce
milk rich in human proteins that could fight genetic disorders.
Human proteins from Polly could save thousands of lives.
It was another impressive world first,
but this time the public weren't interested.
The reaction to that wasn't as big because by that time people
were satiated with clones.
There was a nice editorial in the Guardian and it says,
"Roslin Institute does it again," which we liked,
but it was lost in the excitement about Dolly.
But this was good news.
They now had a flock of four-legged drug factories.
The next step was now getting new drugs to the market.
But actually, to deliver a treatment or a therapy is really hard work.
You know, a modern biotech drug now, we're talking about $1 billion.
We're talking about ten years.
We're talking about a lot of failure.
In 2001, the drug entered clinical trials. Not long after,
though, these trials ground to a halt because commercial-scale
production wasn't feasible.
If you didn't have a product which was useful in the clinic to a human,
then all the good technology in the world came to nothing.
The drug failed to reach the market people.
PPL, Roslin's spin-off company, was liquidated.
I had a notion I would put my two daughters through university
on my share of the royalties off the patents,
but, yeah, not to be.
That was a huge disappointment.
We weren't ever going to cure all the world's problems,
but we could have perhaps helped a small bit.
It's disappointing, definitely, but life has to go on.
Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, has died.
She was six years old and was put down
after being diagnosed with lung disease.
There was coverage of her death sort of tantamount to obituaries.
There was a real sense of sadness.
It was sad that she did die, but she was overweight, unfortunately.
She was also spoiled.
Everyone who came wanted to feed her, you know?
It was a huge event.
It was like losing part of the team, basically.
Ian, he'd taken Dolly unusually off for a scan, and that showed
she was suffering from lung tumours and so on,
that really she had to be euthanised, sadly.
At the end of the day,
we don't think that Dolly died as a result of the cloning process.
And I know that Ian found it a very hard decision indeed.
But nearby in Edinburgh, at the National Museum of Scotland,
there was a very different reaction to her death.
We felt that, because she was a local girl, that we wanted
to have her when she died.
The Roslin Institute knew to call our taxidermists,
they had their home phone numbers and everything,
and it was inevitable it was going to happen.
And our taxidermist went out there and skinned Dolly,
and she was in our freezer by the end of the day.
Here at the museum, Dolly lives on - stuffed and mounted.
Well, Dolly's super popular, I mean, people come
from all around the world to come and see Dolly
and to have their photograph taken with her.
She's just this piece of cutting edge technology in sheep's clothing.
I mean, she's just a superstar.
After Dolly's death, Ian Wilmut made a clean break from animal research.
He was now using the revolutionary Dolly technology to clone human
cells of enormous medical value - stem cells.
Oh, yeah, aren't they beautiful?
Stem cells are cells that can develop
into any specific cell when the body needs them.
After decades of struggling,
it was now possible to harness these cells.
Could use these so-called stem cells to either grow
replacement tissue, to maybe grow a replacement organ.
You could create tissue to test drugs on.
20 years from now, it might be me,
but it might be your father,
somebody who is suffering horribly with Parkinson's disease.
This sort of approach will offer more effective treatments
for many of the diseases,
which reflect damage to particular cell types.
In 2006, on the other side of the world, stem cell research
was advanced thanks to a breakthrough of a young Japanese
scientist called Shinya Yamanaka.
Directly inspired by the Dolly technology, he developed a form
of stem cells without having to harvest them from a human embryo.
And obviously, in the case of people, it's a bit yucky to think
that you've got to create embryos
and now the Yamanaka method offered a way to bypass that -
a much more ethically sure-fire way of doing this thing.
In 2008, the world of science recognised the combined achievements
of the three men - Keith Campbell, Ian Wilmut and Shinya Yamanaka
were awarded the distinguished Shaw Prize in Life Sciences,
referred to as the Nobel Prize of the east.
I am, of course, honoured to accept this award.
I accept it on behalf of the whole team
who were involved in the research
and that, of course, includes my fellow laureate Keith Campbell.
Shinya Yamanaka acknowledged that his work
would have been impossible without Ian's creation of Dolly.
Without Ian's work, before Dolly,
he would have been shooting in the dark.
The team that created Dolly has long dispersed,
but, wherever they go, Dolly is never far behind them.
I went into San Francisco airport with a security guard. He said,
"Are you cloning human beings?" And I said, "No, I'm not."
And he said, "Well, you have a great visit, sir.
"By the way, if the next person through looks like you,
"I'm calling you back."
Now, it just shows you where Dolly got to.
It got everywhere.
There is definitely a certain bond
between those of us who were involved.
We certainly didn't anticipate this as been something
that we would ever experience in our working lives.
It was very exciting because we were pulling together and we were pulling
together because we were under threat.
It was really true, if one person had kicked a hole in the bottom
of the boat, the whole boat would have sunk.
SHEEP BLEAT
Oh, do you, do you want from some of this?
Keith Campbell, the man whose impossible theory sparked Dolly
into life, became professor of animal development
at Nottingham University,
where he carried on his ground-breaking work.
Keith died in 2012 at the age of 58.
The passing of Keith came as a huge shock.
It hit me harder than I think I thought it would.
I think he could have gone on and perhaps achieved more, definitely.
I think he would have.
I just wish he was still here.
The leader of the Dolly team, Ian Wilmut, moved
to Edinburgh University to continue his fight to find cures
for our most crippling degenerative disorders.
In 2018, he revealed he had an even greater fight on his hands.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson's before Christmas.
Obviously, the disappointment that it will...
..possibly shorten my life slightly,
more particularly, it will alter the quality of life.
He remains a popular figure for his pivotal role in creating Dolly...
CHATTER AND LAUGHTER
..the sheep that changed the world.
I think he was a pretty inspirational leader,
actually, because he raised the money, he hired the people,
he trained the staff.
Frankly, there would have been no Dolly without Ian.
Dolly was this beacon of hope, if you like, you know, something new,
something Scottish as well.
We created something amazing that, you know,
I'd been taught you couldn't do.
In theory, the sky's the limit.
I just wish it would hurry up.