Meeting Dolly the Sheep

DollytheSheepThis summer I was fortunate enough to go on vacation to the U.K. and Ireland. One of the highlights of the trip was visiting Scotland, which included an afternoon at the National Museum of Scotland. I had no idea I’d be seeing there an iconic artifact from the field of bioethics. The museum holds the taxidermied remains of Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Dolly was cloned by Sir Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh. Dolly lived six years and had six offspring. On the choice of name, Wilmut explained that “Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell and we couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.” Dolly has been mentioned in over 225 law review articles, including Does Dolly Deserve Defense? An Analysis of the Patentability of Cloned Livestock, 15 High Tech. L. 135 (2014).