LONDON — Ian Wilmut, the cloning pioneer whose work was critical to the creation of Dolly the Sheep in 1996, has died at age 79.
Initially referred to as “6LL3” in the academic paper describing the work, the lamb was later named Dolly, after the singer Dolly Parton. The lamb’s cloning was the first time scientists were able to coax a mature adult cell into behaving like a cell from a newly fertilized embryo in order to create a genetically identical animal.
The year after Dolly’s creation, U.S. President Bill Clinton imposed a ban on the use of federal funds for human cloning but stopped short of banning all cloning research.
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