Decades project - Science Section

Creating the Genetic Replica: Ian Wilmut

• Ian Wilmut Date of birth: July 7, 1944
• Ian Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucey, England, and raised in the ancient town of Coventry, a medieval town devastated by German bombs during World War II.
• His childhood interest in the outdoors and farming led him to study agricultural studies at the nearby University of Nottingham. Summer internships in focused his interest on embryology. He began to concentrate on animal genetic engineering and received his doctorate at the Uiversity of Cambridge in 1971. His thesis was on the freezing of boar semen. Since his postdoctoral work, he has been in the forefront of genetic research.
• Ian Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucey, England, near Warwick on July 7, 1944. His father, David Wilmut, was a math teacher. Wilmut described himself as a pretty average student.At Darwin College, Cambridge University, Wilmut met researcher Chris Porge who had discovered how to freeze cells in 1949. His father had a severe case of diabetes that caused blindness for the last thirty years of his life. This disease may have been another factor that led Wilmut to develop an interest in this field.In January 1996, Wilmut began the cloning procedure. He took the DNA of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe's mammary gland switched off its active genes, and fused it with an egg cell from a Scottish Blackface ewe from which he had removed the genetic material. He used electricity to fuse that mammary cell with its own DNA to the empty egg while it was in a dormant state. He repeated the process with 277 udder cells and eggs from sheep. Only 29 of the eggs actually began to grow and divide into embryos. Wilmut transferred the 29 embryos into surrogate mother sheep. Thirteen became pregnant.
• I believe Iam Wilmut was important to the scientific world because he did something that many thought was impossible. He might of been discouraged by many but he didn't care he chased after his dreams and beliefs. Many of the reasons why he did certain things might of been for his father. His name goes down in history as being the first to clone a animal.