I still can’t believe
what a big thing it is to people.
To the majority of the scientific community
this animal was impossible.
I don’t think you’d find anyone
who’s not actually heard of Dolly.
It’s now twenty years since Dolly was born.
Certainly, a proportion of the work
was done at the farm here in Roslin.
And it’s lovely to be back actually.
Walking through the doors of this building,
it all just came flooding back.
The aim wasn’t – as far as I’m aware –
ever to make Dolly the sheep:
an animal cloned from an adult mammalian cell.
It was in order to have full flocks of cloned sheep
producing identical proteins in their milk that could be used,
hopefully, in the future for human therapeutic use.
We were taking steps in that direction.
The adult cell is the ultimate step that we could take.
It was really hard work
so hand-eye-coordination, for us, was paramount.
You had to make sure you were never hung-over,
because you could not do that work… I couldn’t do that work…
Your hands would shake too much.
Not that I would come to work hung-over, obviously.
Most of the oocytes were collected surgically.
They were then loaded into a tube
– probably an eppendorf –
and brought up to the work at the main institute
which is no longer there.
I used to actually tuck them in my bra strap,
which was nice and warm,
so it would keep them a nice constant temperature,
to take them back up the road.
So Dolly, probably, at one point, was here.
There was always this mild niggle of a doubt
in the back of our minds…
Had we done it properly?
I really wonder how we actually did it.
We should just be thankful
we had our lucky socks on that day, I suppose.
This is the actual building where Dolly was born.
You’re never one hundred percent sure you’ve got the correct cell,
you’ve got the correct animal.
So the fact that when the lamb came out,
and it looked totally different from its surrogate mother,
then we certainly were pretty sure, ourselves.
When the news broke, by Monday morning,
all hell had broken loose in the car park.
I think one of the things
that helped make it appealing to such a wide range
– whether it was age, nationality, anything –
was definitely Dolly herself.
She knew how to play to the camera
even from a young age.
I think she was just born to be photogenic.
And I know that we fielded a lot of calls
from people with some very sad stories,
and it did seem to capture the imagination
and the hope of people,
that this might lead to cures for all sorts of things
or that people might be able to clone children that they’d lost.
And a lot of that was heart breaking – it really was.
I have been told by a number of people
that the biggest problem that they had
was that all the notes had to be rewritten,
because what they’d been teaching people
for the whole of their life was now untrue.
The legacy in science is that
it got people thinking about stem cells.
When Dolly was born it disproved the fact
that once a cell was differentiated it couldn’t be undifferentiated.
And even things like IPS cells
(Induced pluripotent stem cells)
would have been impossible.
It’s that hope that might come of it.
Whether it’s cures for diseases
or better understanding of how everything works…
because we thought one way
and then we just flipped it on its head
and people have to think about it another way now.