Wilmut, Ian

Frosty the Boar Calf

As a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, Wilmut worked with Chris Polge, who had worked for several years in the field of cryo—biology, or freezing cells. Here he was involved in studying boar sperm, earning his doctorate 1971. He was offered a post in Cambridge and stayed on to work on freezing embryos—work that eventually resulted in the birth of the first boar calf formed from a frozen embryo in 1973. The calf was christened Frosty Two (Frosty One had been born a number of years earlier from Chris Polge's work with frozen sperm). The techniques used in the freezing and thawing of the embryo that resulted in Frosty Two are essentially the same techniques that are still used in fertility treatments.

Dolly the Sheep

After his work at the University of Cambridge, Wilmut joined the Roslin Institute in Scotland (previously known as the Animal Research Breeding Station); it was here that he began working with sheep cells. Wilmut and biologist Keith Campbell worked together to produce a pair of Welsh mountain sheep—Megan and Morag—Cloned from differentiated embryonic cells in 1995.

Meanwhile, they also worked on a technique to make cells quiescent, or inactive, so that their cell cycles could be coordinated and the nucleus of an adult somatic cell (which contains all the organism's genetic material) inserted into an egg cell (which contains factors that help the cell differentiate into the organs and tissues that make up an organism); as a result of this work, Dolly, a Finn Dorset lamb named after Dolly Parton and the world's first cloned mammal, was born in 1996; the study was reported in Nature. Dolly died at the age of 6 years in 2003.

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