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It may seem bizarre, but when Dolly was born I was gardening. It was July 1996, and we knew that, if this lamb survived, she would be the first animal ever cloned from an adult cell. I had issued instructions that only people who needed to attend the birth should be there. I followed my own rule.
My colleague Keith Campbell, who had such a big role, was on holiday. When he came back everybody went for dinner. The media circus came much later – in February of the following year, when the paper was published.
With a distance of 20 years, it may seem simple to retell it in a clear, step-by-step timeline. But it’s more jumbled than that. Dolly changed a fundamental aspect of how we understand biological development, but her arrival didn’t neatly splice the world into everything that came before and the new dawn that came after.
I first came to what would later be known as the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh after doing research in reproductive biology at the University of Cambridge. There I had developed ways of freezing cow embryos, and that led to the birth of Frostie, the first calf born from a previously frozen embryo, in 1973.
Read full, original post: The clone that changed my life: 20 years after Dolly the sheep
