Dolly: The World’s Most Famous Sheep
Channel 4 - 1 x 90 min
In 1996, a ragtag team of Scottish scientists changed history by creating Dolly the sheep - the first ever mammal clone. From global fame to moral uproar, this is Dolly’s story.
It’s been 30 years since Dolly the sheep shook the world, rewriting the biology textbooks and changing science forever. We look back at the perseverance of a small team of scientists to adapt during Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts, to pull off the impossible. They transformed biology, not only saving their institute, but influencing research world in the decades to come.
Dolly was more than a rebel to scientific dogma. She raised huge moral and ethical questions. Her creator, Ian Wilmut, once said she ushered in ‘the age of biological control’, something that conjured up Frankenstein like connotations, put cloned Hitler’s on the front of magazines and even had the Pope commenting that it ‘reduced humans to mere objects’.
So where has Dolly’s legacy left us? With rapid advancements, we are now able to clone our pets and bringing back extinct species (but no, Jurassic Park does seem to be beyond the realms of possible). And humans – well, copies of us are not completely off the table, but research is veering more towards therapeutic cloning…the ability to provide personalised genetic treatments for conditions like Parkinsons, diabetes, organ transplants etc…
From a sheep pen in Edinburgh, to worldwide stardom. Dolly really shook life as ewe knew it.
Available to watch now on Channel 4
Dolly: The World’s Most Famous Sheep