ALAS poor Dolly, we knew her well. Last week, the most famous sheep in history was painlessly put down, aged six and a half, after she had developed an incurable lung disease.
“While we are very sad at losing her, it’s an experiment that turned upside down our previous view of developmental biology,” says Ian Wilmut, the researcher who created Dolly in 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh.
A post-mortem revealed that Dolly, who survived only half her expected lifespan, had a lung tumour triggered by a virus. Wilmut thinks her premature death was unrelated to the cloning process…
