Scientists Mourn as Dolly the Sheep Creator Ian Wilmut Dies at 79

Sir Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who played a major role in creating the cloned sheep Dolly, has died at age 79, the Roslin Institute announced. Wilmut died on Sunday.

The Institute is the same Scottish research facility is where Wilmut led a team to create Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a feat of science that had previously been thought to be impossible. 

As news of Wilmut’s death broke, colleagues and admirers took to social media to pay tribute. Wilmut had "made a huge contribution to science, to culture, & to mentorship & people. Far beyond Dolly, opening up whole new fields of knowledge & research," World Health Organization chief scientist Jeremy Farrar wrote on X, formerly Twitter. 

Research lab The Euan MacDonald Center posted that Wilmut was "a special man & great scientist," while a University of Edinburgh staff account mourned him as a "hugely respected scientist, colleague, mentor and friend."

RoslinCT, a medicine-focused offshoot of the Roslin Insitute, said on X that "Professor Sir Ian Wilmut achieved the unimaginable by bringing Dolly the Sheep into our lives, marking a monumental leap in cloning and regenerative medicine."

Wilmut's scientific breakthrough was among the greatest of the last century, but it also sparked frenzied, existential debates over the potential of cloning humans.

But in the midst of the brouhaha, Wilmut gave interviews in which he spoke of the need to connect science with the average person's lived experience — a tenet perhaps best expressed by the fact Wilmut named his greatest scientific accomplishment after the country superstar Dolly Parton (Dolly the sheep had been cloned using another sheep's mammary cell). 

"Science and its presentation can sometimes look terribly serious," Wilmut told Scientific American 20 years after Dolly’s creation. "I think it was good for us," he said in reference to Dolly's namesake.

"It made us look human," he added.

Dolly the sheep was born on July 5, 1996. Her birth was living proof that specialized cells could be used to create an exact copy of the organism they were taken from. While other clones had been made before Dolly, they had been created from cells taken from embryos, not adults. She died in 2003 and the body is on display in the National Museum of Scotland. 

A decade after Dolly’s creation, Wilmut moved away from cloning, instead seeking out new ways of creating stem cells. In 2007, he told The Guardian that this change in his research was "easier to accept socially" than the still-controversial cloning he became famous for.

But he also was unafraid to become a scientific subject himself: After being diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, in 2018 Wilmut announced he would try new therapies to slow the disease' progression on himself.

Wilmut is survived by his wife and children, as well as five grandchildren.