Father of Dolly the Cloned Sheep showed as a speaker at Yeditepe University for the first time in Turkey!
Prof. Wilmut, the father of Dolly the Sheep, whose birth at 1996 was a revolutionary success for the scientific world, appeared as an invited speaker at Yeditepe University.
Prof. Ian Wilmut, who is currently teaching at the University of Edinburgh, shared his authentic method, Dolly’s story and his still-going studies with the students of Yeditepe University and science-aficionados at the conference titled “From Cloning Technology to Treatment of Diseases: Dolly’s Story”. Prof. Wilmut indicated that he started to work on cloning after hearing about an embryo’s nucleus being transferred to another at a conversation in 1991.
Prof. Wilmut, who achieved to ‘create’ Dolly via transferring a somatic cell taken from a mammary gland to an unfertilized oocyte, highlighted that, with his groundbreaking discovery, it would be possible to increase the number of the fruitful livestock via cloning as well as treating many genetic disorders. Stating that he doesn’t find the notion of cloning humans ethical, Dr. Wilmut stated that it would be a lot more ethical and beneficial to work on reprogramming our genes and stem cells. Dr. Wilmut said that he and his crew were working to create a library of reprogrammable stem cells, while hoping that such cell banks would proliferate in the world and consequentially be used in the treatment of genetic diseases and in the development of new, therapeutic methods.
Even though 13 years have passed since his birth, Dolly remains one of the most fervently debated topic of interest in the scientific world for being the first clone ever that was created from an adult somatic cell. Although his birth was kept secret at the beginning, Dolly, who has become the most famous sheep of the world after the leakage of his ‘miracle’ in 1997, gave birth to six lambs. The case of Dolly has become a solid proof that a cell taken from a specific region of our body may well be used to reconstruct a person wholly and create a healthy life form.
Who is Prof. Sir Ian Wilmut?
Dr. Ian Wilmut, born in 1944 Hampton Lucy (England) Dr. Ian Wilmut, grew interest in science at a very young age. Prof. Wilmut, having gained his doctorate from Darwin College at Cambridge University in 1971, strengthened his knowledge of science in the following years. He started his studies of transferences of genes back in 1980. Having attempted numerous times (227 times) to clone a life form, he succeeded in doing so with Dolly. With his method, where a somatic cell from mammary gland was taken and transferred, he made it possible to fusion a somatic cell with an oocyte. This success of Prof. Wilmut also paved the way for future studies in the field of genetic transference and cloning. Today, thanks to Prof. Wilmut’s revolutionary method and other contributions, cloning has become a promising procedure for the treatment of genetic disorders. He is still working on his studies regarding the treatment of retinal and neural system diseases at the Centre of Medical Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
