Cloning Scientist Speaks on Campus
Scientist Ian Wilmut, who made history last year by becoming the first researcher to clone an adult mammal, presented two public lectures at UC Davis in May. Wilmut and his research team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, created the clone, a lamb named “Dolly,” using DNA from a mammary gland of an adult ewe. He described the team’s cloning techniques in detail during his lecture, “Are There Any Limits to the Cloning of Animals?,” which was one of two he presented as part of the campus’s Storer Life Sciences Lectures. His second lecture focused on “The Uses of Cloning in Biology and Medicine.”
Photo: Wilmut (right) tours the UC Davis dairy goat facility with undergraduate staff member Nicole Gibson (left) and animal science professor Jim Murray (center).
In describing the team’s cloning techniques, Wilmut conveyed how difficult cloning is. He also relayed his concerns about the appropriateness of human cloning. “It’s a child-welfare issue,” said the embryologist. “In my opinion, it would not be in the interests of the child to be reproduced this way.”
More than 2,000 members of the campus and local community attended the lectures, which were sponsored by the Division of Biological Sciences and Department of Animal Science.
UC Davis Biological Sciences Newsletter - Summer 1998