It's 1996 - the age of savvy tech,
supersonic stars and sporting icons.
FANS SING
TV and film were in overdrive, with new sci-fi worlds
fuelling our imaginations.
The world was riding a science high.
Boundaries were being pushed and new ideas tested.
And in a sleepy village near Edinburgh,
an excited scientific team were herding the paparazzi
into their very own sheep pen.
A huge sort of press migration occurred
to this little agricultural station.
It was like a big football game. Lots of press attention.
It was chaos.
This is the story of how a small group of scientists
changed the course of history.
They created the world's most famous sheep.
A breakthrough so huge it captured the attention of world leaders.
It was the first really new piece of science
in the field of biotechnology that broke
in the era of the Internet.
The idea of going viral,
I mean, that term wasn't yet around, but that's what happened.
Dolly the sheep. Dolly the sheep.
Dolly the sheep. The world's first clone.
SHEEP BAAS
Dolly was a creation no-one saw coming
and the world doubted was even possible.
The simple thing is,
when I was told that they had cloned a sheep,
I just didn't believe it.
The background was that cloning was impossible.
It was a dogma. You couldn't do it.
My own history of being a student with Sir John Gurdon
told me that his wonderful Nobel Prize-winning experiments
with frogs had shown him that if he took adult cells,
you could never get a frog.
So I thought, well, if we take adult sheep cells,
we're never going to get an adult sheep.
One thing to be clear about is a lot of people talk about Dolly
as if she was the first cloned animal.
She wasn't. She was the first animal cloned from an adult cell.
She proved that you could take an adult cell
that's made all the decisions in its lifetime
and wind it all the way back and start development again.
And that proved that in mammals this was possible
and the choices and the fates of adult cells are not irreversible.
Cloning from an adult cell was meant to be impossible.
Once a cell had its role, it was permanent.
The chance of Dolly ever existing was microscopic,
but fate was on Roslin's side.
I think over 200 embryos were transferred to surrogate mothers
and only one of those embryos developed.
We got one pregnancy.
The birth of Dolly the sheep ignited a fascination in me.
When for 30 years it's like,
well, we can do it in frogs, we can't do it in mammals,
that really upends a lot of thinking.
The textbooks literally were being rewritten about what was possible.
The Roslin Institute was a government research centre
with a strong focus on agricultural science.
In the early 1990s, it found itself at the mercy
of brutal financial cuts.
British scientists have called on Mrs Thatcher to put an end
to Britain's brain drain, saying they're concerned
that scientific research is being starved of funds.
I knew about Roslin because I'd worked for The Scotsman,
but was Roslin Institute known worldwide? No, it wasn't.
It was deeply respected within the sphere of agricultural research,
but as a leading intellectual centre in the world? No, it wasn't there.
It was a traditional research institute.
A lot of people had been there for years and years.
It was a very different environment than I'd been used to.
I think working for the civil service,
things were a little bit more kind of Heath Robinson
in the approach to some of the things in the laboratory.
Their attitude towards, you know, getting things done.
Americans were very go, go, go, you know? We did 12 or 14-hour shifts,
whereas, working at the Institute, you'd clock in
and then it would be tea break time.
And even if you had embryos out on the desk or out in the hood,
it would be, like, "Oh, they'll be fine. Just leave them.
"We'll be OK. We can come back to them later."
While I was at the Institute,
we could see this new building going up.
It was literally like Legoland and there was a bit of a buzz about it
because this was a company called PPL Therapeutics.
In those days, government institutes couldn't start their own spin-offs
in the way they could today,
and so PPL essentially started as a vehicle
for commercialising Roslin's work,
and Tracy was our first animal
as a company,
but it was done in collaboration with Roslin.
PPL were searching for a treatment for conditions like cystic fibrosis,
turning to a branch of science called transgenics.
Tracy was the first sheep to offer a real glimmer of hope.
Her milk had been genetically engineered
to contain a viable amount of a crucial protein
needed by those with the condition.
But the technology was unpredictable, crude
and rudimentary.
One of the biggest limitations of the kind of transgenic technology
that was used to make Tracy is that you have to have
lots and lots and lots of fertilised eggs
and you have to inject a piece of DNA into every single one,
and you can't control where it's going to go.
It's then that they came to realise
that collaborating with the Institute
and moving into the cloning project
might actually be beneficial to them.
We shared a canteen with the scientists in Roslin
and several of our staff used to go there every day
and they'd have scientific conversations over lunch,
and it's one of those conversations that led to us learning
about Megan and Morag.
In 1996, the Roslin team unveiled twin lambs Megan and Morag -
clones created from embryonic cells.
REPORTER: Most sheep look alike, but these two at this
Edinburgh research institute are more than just alike,
they're genetically identical.
The technology used to create the lambs was called nuclear transfer -
a more sophisticated and efficient technique
that takes DNA out from one cell
to be replaced with new DNA from a different animal.
It was exactly what PPL were looking for.
They were the first things that I noticed and I thought,
oh, yeah, there are things happening here,
and it really came into my sphere of interest
as a place where hot science was going on.
Megan and Morag were the game-changer for us.
We got together and said,
"Well, this is really quite important technology.
"How can we get access to it?"
The lambs raised the profile of Roslin,
giving them credibility and opportunity.
I had moved down to PPL Therapeutics.
That was when those who were higher than me, if you like,
the Alan Colemans of the world,
started talking with Ian Wilmut about a collaborative project.
And we were just having wide-ranging conversations,
"How do we crack this sort of problem?"
Ian Wilmut was a leading figure in the developmental biology world.
His vision and leadership were crucial
in shaping Roslin's experiments.
Alongside him was Keith Campbell, an extraordinary scientist
with a talent for thinking outside the box.
As part of that collaborative project,
there were a couple of us who were to work alongside
with the staff at the Roslin Institute.
Bill Ritchie was one of the members of the team.
Compared to where I'd worked before, where we used to buy everything in,
including the little microinjection tools,
the little, tiny, fine glass pipettes that we'd use,
Bill used to make his own, and he'd love to leave me
in the corner of a different lab making these glass pipettes
to do the nuclear transfer with.
There was one morning, on the 8th of February, 1996,
where there was a definite frisson of panic.
One of the cell lines had failed.
A disaster which left PPL without cells to use in the next experiment.
Unless this could be resolved,
months of work and a huge amount of money would be lost.
Now, we had a project management committee
where we had three scientists from the Roslin Institute
and three scientists from PPL,
and so, you know, we're discussing, "Well, what can we do?"
"Well, we can take these mammary cells
"from this older animal that had been frozen.
"Why don't we try those?"
But there was a catch.
The mammary cells were from a six-year-old sheep.
In order to use these cells to create a new lamb,
they needed to reprogramme them back to a younger cell stage.
Nobody had done this before.
I think what had happened was that Ian and Keith
had been talking to the people in PPL and they decided,
"Well, let's see if we can go the whole hog and try this."
It wasn't part of what we wanted to do.
It wasn't part of the design of the experiment.
We had a discussion about what we thought
the prospects of success were.
Most people thought, "This isn't going to work."
I think Keith Campbell thought it might work, but he wasn't sure.
No-one was sure, so I reluctantly said yes.
Keith had been exploring the life cycle of cells
and wanted to test an idea where perhaps reprogramming was possible.
It was a hunch,
but, if proved right, would change biology forever.
His colleagues, however, were more sceptical.
They never told us they were going to do mammary gland cells
because we wouldn't have given them money if they had have done
because we would have thought it was a crazy idea.
We just thought, "Really? That's never going to work."
We all just rolled our eyes but, hey, we gave it a go.
Karen and Bill started the painstaking process
of assembling the embryos to implant into the donor sheep.
They took the six-year-old mammary cell DNA
and inserted it into an empty egg cell,
also called an oocyte.
The way it worked in the "cupboard", which was Bill's cloning lab,
that particular day Bill enucleated all the oocytes that we had,
so that means you were taking out the DNA that you didn't want
from the Scottish Blackface donors, and then he would pop these cells
that we didn't think would work back in.
And then what you needed to do was to actually make the cells
schmooze together with the oocytes.
And essentially what you were doing was you were using an electrical
current, and that pretty much mimicked what a sperm would do,
and it would create this electrical current
that would kick-start the embryo to then start dividing.
And so this is why we joke that Bill is Dolly's mum and I'm Dolly's dad,
because I, essentially, did the sperm bit.
So the technology that led to the birth of Dolly,
it's hard to overstate how technically demanding it is.
You've got tiny, tiny embryos,
you're fiddling around with little glass pipettes, taking DNA out,
putting DNA in, and you have to have a lot of goes at it.
You need hundreds of eggs.
It's incredibly difficult.
The lab was a mile away from the farm and the cold weather
would destroy the embryos without the proper equipment.
Karen and Bill, however, had an imaginative solution.
One or two of us would ping pong backwards and forwards
between the farm down at Dryden.
We'd have to try and keep the embryos warm.
Bill used to use his top pocket of his shirt,
which was fine, but I didn't.
I would maybe have a T-shirt on,
so the only way I could think of keeping them warm was
I used to tuck them in the top of my bra strap,
and that turns out to be the ideal way
of keeping them at the right temperature.
When we got the information that one animal was pregnant,
we didn't jump up and down because we felt that,
"Well, this isn't going to last",
but it did.
Dolly entered the world at 4.30pm on the 5th of July, 1996,
in the lambing shed at Dryden Farm.
As she originated from mammary cells,
John Bracken, a research assistant, made an off the cuff remark
that they would have to call the lamb Dolly -
a nod to Dolly Parton.
I was at my friend's wedding up in Plockton,
and no mobile phones in those days, or no signal,
and the only way was I'd left the fax number
of the hotel I was staying in.
And what she did was she sent a fax to say, "She's been born.
"Mother and baby fine.
"She has a white face and furry legs.
"Hope you have a good weekend."
That code meant that I knew she had a white face and furry legs,
so she was not a Scottish Blackface, which had been the donor oocyte.
I did make a quick dash down to the bar to celebrate
and said something about being a dad,
and of course everybody must have thought I was barking mad.
She'd be delighted to know that that's something that happened
on her wedding day and we had done a world's first.
But reality soon intruded.
They weren't just handling a small scientific finding,
they were about to face the full glare of global media.
The world was still in the dark
about the breakthrough Roslin had created.
The team were now sitting on
one of the biggest genetics discoveries ever made.
This question of can you take an adult cell
and wind the clock back to start again,
it wasn't that the Roslin team were the only people looking at this.
People were investigating this in mice,
they were looking at these kinds of questions.
But what you had at Roslin was the perfect storm.
You had the technical expertise,
you had the experiments in the form of Megan and Morag,
you had the money to support that research,
and you really had the curiosity to find out, "Can we do this?"
One of the most important factors of the whole story around Dolly
is the fact that it was a huge team effort.
Often we joke about having the right colour socks on
and whether it was a lucky day or not,
and I still think sometimes it was just lucky socks.
And it's the persistence and the perseverance of everybody
that was involved with the whole project.
And there we go, we got Dolly.
Dolly was science's next celebrity,
and those inside Roslin were well aware of her importance.
What had happened the previous year was,
with the production of Megan and Morag,
that the Roslin Institute had essentially perfected
the procedures for cloning,
and so then, by producing Dolly with the adult cell,
that was, if you like, the big leap.
I think that was what excited me most -
the idea that being a specialised cell didn't mean
that your genetic blueprint was fixed for life, if you want.
You could actually reprogramme it.
That was something that no-one had done before,
and so I was academically very excited about that.
You also have to remember that every textbook on biology
had to be rewritten, because every textbook on biology says
you go from the embryo to an adult, to a liver cell or a kidney cell,
and you can't go backwards,
and Dolly showed that you can go backwards.
The clock was ticking down to her announcement.
The team had to keep the story of the scientific superstar
absolutely secret.
When I got back from Plockton,
I came into work and it was just abuzz
with everything that was going on.
Everybody was aware that she'd been born, but it was all top secret.
I got to see quite a lot of her
and she got very much used to human beings,
and she would practically perform.
She was like the Naomi Campbell of the sheep world
because she literally would... I don't know, she...
You know, she'd kind of, like, fluff herself up.
She definitely knew how to perform for the crowd.
She was like a little show pony.
We were all instructed to keep quiet
because it might prejudice the publication of a paper,
which would be, you know, a widely acclaimed paper.
Those of us who knew generally kept to that secrecy,
but Keith was not a good secret keeper.
Unfortunately, he couldn't help himself.
He was telling everybody scientifically.
He said, "I've got a big secret."
But he told them.
He told them the cell type that was used.
I would never do that, but he did, and the people kept quiet.
It was surprising.
I mean, they didn't always keep completely quiet.
I went to a meeting the month before the paper for Dolly was published,
and I was swimming in a swimming pool somewhere...
Near Mar-a-Lago, in fact.
And a scientist swam up to me and said,
"We know what you've done", with a wink.
And, of course, I laughed. I was a bit embarrassed.
I blushed a bit because, you know, I was a bit...
I was a bit worried. You know, what if these type of people
release it to the press? But no-one did that.
Until the press released it prematurely themselves
the next month, yeah.
The team never expected to be in the limelight,
and the imminent announcement of Dolly
meant calling in some additional help.
When Megan and Morag was announced, of course,
there was a lot of media attention.
How did a small institute in Scotland
come to be doing something like this, you know?
It gave us a bit of a fright because we realised we didn't have
the ability to handle the press in those sort of numbers.
So we did actually sit down with somebody who asked us questions
so we were ready for them and we knew what we were going to say.
Just a little bit prepared.
I remember looking at the pre-print of the Nature paper
and my first reaction was, "This can't be true."
Then it dawned on me that it was true
because Nature were going to publish it.
And at that point I began to think more about how the implications
would be understood, how big the story would be,
so I quite quickly flipped from
not being able to believe that this piece of science had happened
to actually get a handle on how big it was,
and my reaction was, yes, this is definitely going to be a big story.
Chris was part of a communications agency called De Facto.
It was their job to make sure the science wasn't misunderstood.
If not, the team could face public backlash.
It was important to prepare material
that would allow people to understand it,
so diagrams, briefing documents, photography,
but this was a very different time.
We had someone come in and spend about an hour
trying to upload this thing through a modem to Reuters.
You know, it was slightly crazy.
The difference!
Ian sent us the Nature paper, saying...
In a footnote on the bottom, he wrote, "You should be aware of this.
"There may be some media interest."
Well, Nature, the journal, which is the most prestigious
journal in the UK, if not in the world,
you wanted to have your paper in that journal.
For scientists, it's kind of a dream to be...
To have their research published in Nature.
There will be scientists who go through their entire careers
wishing that they could have a Nature publication,
and so there would be a lot of anxiety around making sure
that nothing happened that put that in jeopardy.
Roslin and PPL had their Dolly results accepted by Nature.
The big reveal was locked in for Thursday the 27th of February, 1997,
with a press release sent to journalists the week before
under tight embargo.
Any leak risked Roslin's scientific credibility.
The scientific paper was given to some of the newspapers,
the British newspapers,
a good week before the publication date,
and they were told to embargo the paper.
You're giving them a brief, essentially, by giving them
the paper, but they weren't to actually divulge the information
until it was published in the scientific journal.
I was under the simple position that we had to run it
before the release, which was a Wednesday or Thursday,
or we were dead.
I knew ahead of it before anybody else.
I hated the idea of knowing something,
and then having to sit and watch
while everybody else gets a nice, easy kind of play on it.
And this is the problem of Sunday newspapers -
you get one shot a week.
And then suddenly Robert McKee broke the press embargo
on the Sunday - The Observer covered it.
It was my wife's birthday, and suddenly I got a phone call saying,
"Can we have an opinion on this?",
so I hastily sent my press release off to the BBC
and I had a phone call back saying,
"Can you come to our Edinburgh studio tonight
"to appear on Newsnight?"
Is there anything intrinsically wrong with this research, Dr Bruce?
As far as the research is concerned, I think it's a remarkable
development and that in itself doesn't worry me.
It's more the applications that concern me.
No, I mean, I didn't get Nature, so I was under no embargo from them.
I was staying with my cousin in Yorkshire
and I told him about Dolly the night before.
He went out in the morning and came back with a Sunday papers
and said to me as he came through, "It's all over the Sunday papers".
and I thought he was winding me up. HE LAUGHS
But he wasn't. It was in the Sunday papers.
I think Ian Wilmut was the first to be informed
that the embargo had been broken.
We had press teams...
Our own press teams in PPL and at Roslin Institute.
We prepared ourselves for the publication,
we had not prepared ourselves for a leak.
I was in my second year at university
when the news about Dolly the sheep broke,
and this was really like a rocket in the world of developmental biology.
It's one of the things that inspired me
to go on in the scientific field that I did,
and I remember seeing the cover of Nature
with the picture of Dolly on it and thinking,
this is just absolutely incredible.
It's a really hackneyed thing to say -
the textbooks were being rewritten - but they literally were.
No-one had managed to do this before.
Only a couple of years earlier,
most scientists wouldn't have known where Roslin was,
but this quiet Edinburgh institute
was about to become the centre of the world's media.
Dolly sent shock waves around the world.
The world's first clone has been produced of an adult mammal.
Scientists in Scotland have produced a sheep called Dolly
that was cloned in a laboratory using a cell from another sheep.
The media storm stunned those working closest to her.
Once the story had broken,
I don't think either PPL or the Institute
were really prepared for what was about to hit them.
I think they realised that, from a scientific perspective,
it would be, you know, a huge breakthrough,
but the sort of press frenzy that there was was incredible.
And then the shit hit the fan on the Monday, you know?
The reaction was quite astonishing.
I did not anticipate that at all.
I did not see that coming.
I could see sort of the odd bishop or archbishop expressing,
you know, with furrowed brow, or something like that.
I did not anticipate the global response.
And then Clinton got hold of it.
I have asked our distinguished
National Bioethics Advisory Commission
to conduct a thorough review of the legal and ethical issues
raised by this new cloning discovery.
And it just went off like a rocket then.
And, at that point, it bypassed me because we had done it.
Nothing else we could say for another week,
so I was a bystander as the story that I thought was quite good
sort of reverberated around the world, to my astonishment.
And, of course, they all wanted to see Dolly,
so the one big shed we had, we had to clean all that out quickly
and put Dolly in it.
It turned into a media circus,
with reporters from around the world flocking to her pen.
A US chat show asked about Dolly's availability
and the phones rang nonstop,
even reaching Roslin's cleaning cupboard.
So I found myself first port of call for a lot of the media enquiries,
and my role was to speak to journalists.
It was just a huge, huge task
and we had more than 2,000 calls in a two-week period.
It took the skin off my ear.
I'd been on the phone so much that both of my ears were blistered.
And quite surreal at times.
I'd come back to my desk and there'd be a note there saying
can I please call the Vatican or can I call the White House.
That was normal for several days - to come back and just have
these extraordinary...
Now extraordinary-seeming messages.
Throughout the world, Dollymania had well and truly arrived.
She sparked heated debate
amongst governments and religious leaders alike.
How easy might it be scientifically for someone, somewhere,
to apply your method to the cloning of humans?
It would be my belief that if you really wanted to do it,
it could be done.
AL GORE: Ever since scientists in Scotland
successfully cloned an adult sheep, the President and those of us
who work with him, along with the rest of the nation,
have grappled with the meaning and significance of the discovery.
There were also personal aspects that came through as well,
because Ian Wilmut had a secretary at the time called Jackie,
and I do remember being down in the office with her
and her taking phone calls from people who would say,
"My child is ill. Can you do anything to help?"
We also had people saying, "Oh..., you know,
"..I love my dog so much but it's old.
"Can you clone my dog for me so that I get the same one?"
The funniest one for me was certainly, "Well, we don't need men
in the world anymore." That didn't work out, really, though, did it?
SHE CHUCKLES
But I really don't think any of us were prepared
for the amount of attention,
and worldwide attention as well.
That also attracted other groups and factions,
which I think had probably always been aware
of some of the animal work that had gone on at the Roslin Institute
and there'd be the odd protest,
but the Institute became much more of a target,
and we were actually shown by the Army
how to check under our cars for incendiary devices, just in case,
which was a little bit scary.
SHEEP BAAS
There was an attempt to break in, but, of course, Dryden Farm
had several different buildings, and, if I remember correctly,
they tried to break in the wrong building.
I'm not quite sure what they were going to do with her.
Perhaps hold her for ransom or something. Not sure.
But what they didn't realise was
there was actually quite a lot of sheep down at Dryden Farm,
so when they broke in,
they were faced with hundreds of other sheep
and they didn't know which one she was,
so they had to leave empty-handed.
Dolly had become an icon.
She was a symbol of scientific genius
that also stirred uneasy, Frankenstein-like fears
about where cloning might lead.
Dolly was born into a world that maybe wasn't quite ready
for what she meant scientifically.
We'd had Jurassic Park a couple of years before.
You know, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".
We'd had pictures of a mouse with an ear on its back.
That's nothing to do with cloning, but it sort of gets bucketed
in the same place in people's imaginations.
And you have all the discussion around GM foods
and what does that mean and do we want them.
And so when Dolly appears and it's this cloned sheep,
what does it mean next?
I think everyone freaked out.
And what she actually meant in scientific terms,
as the sort of big bang for a whole slew of changed understanding,
really got lost.
It was a very big story, but I think it captured the imagination,
in part, because the story had a face.
She was a rather cuddly-looking sheep,
and it kind of distracted you from the science that was going on.
A lot of people thought Dolly was genetically manipulated animal,
but she wasn't.
It was a tour de force, yes, but it wasn't a genetic manipulation.
So people were a bit confused on that side.
But the main focus of attention was, "Well, are humans next?"
That was the real concern.
The concept of you could take a cell from
an animal's tissue and make a completely new animal out of it,
and could you do it with humans?
You know, that grasped the imagination.
So animal cloning rather got lost in the frenzy
to look at all the implications of human cloning.
REPORTER: One scientist has announced he plans to clone his wife
at a Japanese clinic, where it may be legal.
What kind of ways could this technology be abused by a dictator?
That's what I ask myself.
Perhaps Saddam Hussein would like to give birth to himself
to see his own twin brought up in his own home,
not just once but 100 times. 10,000 times.
And, of course, the answer is
that it would have been almost impossible to do it with humans.
I mean, to try and get that amount of embryo,
to try and get that amount of donors,
to try and get that amount of women willing to be surrogates.
You know, it's really out of the question.
Let alone the embryology of humans is slightly different.
So I didn't think it was ever going to be feasible.
Dolly was acknowledged as Science Breakthrough of the Year in 1997,
beating even Nasa's Pathfinder mission to Mars.
But the team kept working on,
determined to advance the technology and take cloning further.
I mean, we had then since created other sheep.
We'd had Molly and Cupid and Diana.
Sheep called Polly and Holly.
And so on.
I think there were four or five of these animals.
People were interested, "Where do these names come from?",
and people made jokes about it, like,
"Why didn't you have a sheep called Trolley?
"Because you guys must be off your trolley."
You know, British expression.
Or Bolly. "Why don't you call it Bolly after Bollinger Champagne?
"Because it's such a wonderful..."
You know, people got a bit silly.
These sheep are just a selection of the post-Dolly flock.
Alan turned to pigs, applying the tech
in a bid to create organs for human transplant.
There have been pigs whose organs have been given to humans,
and they came from pigs
that a spin-off from PPL made for the first time
around about 2001.
Hasn't totally succeeded yet. It's a huge challenge.
And Dolly,
she had six healthy lambs with a Welsh mountain sheep named David.
The thing about Dolly was, one, she was a positive science story.
The other science stories that I've covered -
climate change, space crashes, Chernobyl -
are all very negative stories about science.
The great thing about Dolly was that she's been a force for good,
despite all the fears about cloning.
And another thing, of course, she was very good for British science.
This is a British science breakthrough.
But by 2002,
Dolly's health had started to go downhill.
Well, there was a problem that we had to keep Dolly in a shed,
so, you know, she picked up respiratory problems,
she picked up arthritis in one of her legs.
REPORTER: Dolly looks like an ordinary sheep,
but, in many ways, she remains a mystery.
At just five years old, she's developed arthritis in her hind leg.
And she got this very bad infection, we thought, in her lung.
It turned out to be some sort of cancer.
I hadn't been quite aware of how poorly she had become
and that she was going for tests up at the vet school.
To save Dolly any more pain,
the decision was taken to euthanize her.
She passed away on Valentine's Day 2003.
Soon after, the team gathered with champagne in hand
to celebrate the sheep who changed science forever.
I do remember writing a piece for that, and my words were,
you know, "Farewell, Dolly.
"You leave the world a better place for your existence",
because I think she was a power for the good. She was...
You know, she was... Her existence was important.
Dolly changed the world,
but her influence didn't die with her.
She gave rise to a whole new era of ground-breaking, radical science.
We can see the birth of Dolly as the big bang
that exploded an entire field of research.
Her greatest legacy is that she showed us what is possible
for an adult cell to do.
And in the intervening years, we've really increased our understanding
of how to make cells do our bidding.
It's unlocked this whole field of regenerative medicine.
You basically unlock biological time.
You effectively open a whole world of biological possibility.
I left PPL in 2001,
and then I went into academia in Singapore in about 2006, 2007.
Human embryonic stem cells,
but that just sort of coincided
with the wonderful work that Shinya Yamanaka had pioneered.
What Shinya Yamanaka had done which was extraordinary
is you don't need the whole oocyte or an egg
to reprogramme a cell.
All you need is four factors to kick-start the process.
Shinya Yamanaka discovered that adding just four genes,
also called factors,
could reprogramme a cell back to its earliest state.
This initiated revolutionary research into cell rejuvenation -
a giant leap in biology.
Shinya received the Nobel Prize in 2012
alongside John Gurdon,
and has always credited Dolly as his inspiration.
You basically just start the process and then stop it,
and if you do that a few times,
they stay what they are.
So if you started with skin cells, they stay skin cells.
But what happens is they become younger.
If you take cells from a 90-year-old individual
and then partially reprogramme those cells,
they get rejuvenated to probably 40 years
or 20 years old.
It's very exciting to have the ability
to suddenly introduce these factors for a few days
and you're 20 years younger.
Who doesn't want that?
Rejuvenation science is still in its infancy
but the potential is huge.
By winding the clock back but keeping the same cell function,
we might one day be able to treat age-related diseases like dementia,
grow bespoke organs for transplant
and even restore sight.
Now that we have the ability to manipulate cell fate in this way,
there are benefits to it, obvious benefits,
and there are also risks.
For example, when you think about something like cancer,
that happens because cells have forgotten
what they're meant to be doing, which is effectively
what we're doing when we're reprogramming stem cells.
Dr Soufi and his team are investigating
how to make reprogramming more reliable
so that life-changing applications like rejuvenation
can be carried out with far less risk.
I think in the past and still now,
we are playing catch-up with technology.
It is important to think about the consequences
before you start doing something.
It's not to just restrict it,
because ethics and moral questions are not there to restrict you.
They are there to guide you to do things in a certain way.
And also, especially after cloning Dolly,
there was a lot of misunderstanding of what was happening,
and that was not because people were against it,
it's just because people misunderstood what Dolly meant
and what the process was.
As science advances, ethics must also keep pace.
They draw in opinions from religion, business, technology and government.
Ethics is the safeguard that guides science
and stops research from overstepping the line.
Quite simply, we know that the frontiers
of social and environmental progress,
both here in Britain and across the world, depend upon science,
but they also depend on the boundaries
placed on science by society.
But we cannot afford to duck the challenge
just because it will be hard,
for while not everyone is in the business of science,
science is everybody's business.
So, the ability to think ahead is important
because it can help us advance faster,
rather than restrict us from doing things.
However, it's not quite that simple.
Many fear that the biotech giants will be able to play God
with this radical new knowledge and unpredictable innovation.
This whole field of stem cell technology
and regenerative medicine is moving so fast,
it's incredibly hard to keep up with the scientific advances,
the regulatory advances like what's happening where.
Well, there's always concern about biotech companies doing something
that is not in the open, but the science is being done
by thousands of people in different countries in the world,
and if we stopped it in Roslin, for example, or in anywhere in Britain,
it wouldn't stop everybody else from doing it.
Because once the knowledge is out there, knowledge can't be reversed.
You know, it's available to everybody to build on.
Today's advancements in biotechnology
would have sounded like science fiction 30 years ago.
Dolly pushed biological boundaries,
launching a whole new era of genetic opportunity.
So, where we're at now is we have these
incredibly exciting technologies that enable us to control cell fate,
that we can basically turn cells into anything we want.
But the question is, how far can we go?
And so researchers are starting to look at, can we take adult cells
and turn them into things like eggs and sperm in the lab?
And this unlocks the possibility for people
who are unable to have their own biological children
to have eggs and sperm that are made from their own DNA.
Although much more research is needed,
the breakthrough could be a last hope
for those where options like IVF simply wouldn't work.
Scientists take DNA from a skin cell,
reprogramme it, place it into a donor egg
and allow it to develop into an embryo.
In essence, you're making a baby from a skin cell.
Being able to create embryos from skin cells,
I mean, that just about exemplifies
the power of what they achieved at Roslin.
To be able to do that now,
that's not going to produce babies in the next decade,
but one day it offers a real prospect
that people who can't have IVF, people who have got various reasons,
who've lost all their eggs because of a cancer treatment,
will be, ultimately, able to have children.
Now, that is one of the most exciting things
that's ever going to come out, and it's the techniques that were used
to make Dolly that are used to make this a possibility, a prospect.
The impact of Dolly on the scientific community
was truly ground-breaking.
But she didn't just rewrite science,
she transformed ethics and regulation
and sparked debates about what it truly means to be human.
And, of course, made Roslin famous.
After Dolly was born, it put Roslin on the map,
which it wasn't really on the map at that point.
It was an agricultural institute.
Very few people had heard about it,
and those who had heard about it were quite rude about it.
Most people didn't realise we had got into molecular biology
and embryology and those sorts of things.
They didn't realise how the research institute had changed,
but it did become very important for the institute
because it gave us credibility, huge credibility.
I'm sure all of us who were heavily involved can recount stories,
amusing stories,
after, in the years following. There was so much excitement.
For example, I lectured in Cuba
and Fidel Castro got in touch with me.
He was interested in whether our company could clone a cow
that had been a wonderful milker.
The cow was long since dead,
but they'd frozen white blood cells from the cow in liquid nitrogen,
so he wanted to know whether we could resuscitate, if you like,
a herd of these very elite animals by cloning.
I said, "It might be possible,
"but we're not interested in that use of cloning."
As a company, we were interested in the human medical benefits.
But when I left Cuba, I was sitting in the departure lounge
and three military generals came in looking for me.
They presented me with an alligator leather belt,
three bottles of premium Bacardi rum
and a box of 54 Havana cigars
with a card inside signed off by Fidel Castro.
SHEEP BAAS
And she changed forever the lives of those
who got to experience her first-hand.
When I look back, it feels like an enormous privilege
to have been at the centre of something as big as that story was.
But it is also quite surreal.
The most famous person I've ever met wasn't a person, she was a sheep,
and that's quite an odd... It's quite an odd memory to have.
When I left the paper, what happens after you've been there
a certain time, they give you a front page
which is exceptionally rude about you
and it's got all the idiosyncrasies,
and the splash story about me is,
"Science editor cloned from Neanderthal DNA",
and the byline was Dolly the Sheep,
so, you know, it's stuck with me for life.
Dolly came into my life when I was really starting
to get interested in these questions of, "How do genes work?
"How does life work?", and set me on that course.
And when I got to go and see her in the Museum of Scotland,
where she now resides, I wouldn't exactly say we shared a moment,
but I did want to say, well, "Thank you.
"You're just a sheep, but you're a really special one."
The greatest inheritance of the Dolly experiment
was that biologists were made to think differently.
Although no longer with us,
Ian and Keith were the driving force behind Dolly.
Without them, she simply wouldn't exist.
They continued their research,
Ian with personal motivation
after receiving a Parkinson's diagnosis in 2017 -
something Dolly's legacy could one day help treat.
I think the legacy of Dolly,
as we're now 30 years down the line...
..you know, people still know who she is,
what she was,
the breakthrough that that meant.
And although perhaps the hopes that we had
for medicinal developments
haven't happened as quickly as we'd wanted,
they are happening
and I think the legacy of Dolly is there will always be hope.
There is that hope
that what you've been taught or told can't happen
can happen.
Never say never. Always have hope.