Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who cloned Dolly the sheep, has died

Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who became famous for cloning Dolly the sheep, has died. He was 79 years old and suffered from Parkinson's.

His studies leave an indelible mark, "a titan of science" as defined by the University of Edinburgh, which includes the Roslin Institute where Wilmut worked for a long time and in which the first cloning of a mammal took place in 1996 , announced to the world in 1997 in the pages of Nature magazine.

Wilmut «transformed the scientific thinking of his time. That achievement still continues to fuel many of the advances being made in regenerative medicine today,” the vice-chancellor, Sir Peter Mathieson, writes on the university website.

The news of the cloning of Dolly the sheep immediately went around the world and initially struck above all the possibility of obtaining a copy of a mammal, so much so that many also thought about humans. But the meaning of the research of Wilmut and his group, in which Keith Campbell played a fundamental role, was very different: this is demonstrated by the great progress made in 27 years and which is bringing regenerative medicine ever closer.

For the first time it had been possible to demonstrate that the development of a cell is not irreversible. That is: an adult, specialized cell can be taken back in time and regressed to an undifferentiated state, from which it can start developing again in new directions, giving rise to an embryo or cells from different tissues.

And so mice, cows and bulls, mouflons, monkeys and horses were cloned in the years immediately following Dolly's birth, allowing the nuclear transfer technique to be refined and many of the factors of cellular reprogramming to be better known.

Wilmut's dream, however, was to be able to grow organs for transplantation in the laboratory.

(Unioneonline/ss)