Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was born
On this day · 5 July 1996
On July 5, 1996, a lamb grown from a single udder cell proved that an adult body cell could be coaxed to build a whole new animal.
On July 5, 1996, a lamb was born at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh that would rewrite biology. Named Dolly, she was the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell.
Her makers, led by Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, used somatic-cell nuclear transfer: they took the nucleus from a cultured mammary-gland cell of a Finn Dorset ewe and slipped it into an emptied egg cell from a Scottish Blackface sheep, then sparked it to life with electricity. The success rate was brutal — Dolly was the lone survivor after 277 attempts.
An adult cell, supposedly locked into its fate, could be rewound to build an entire animal.
Dolly’s existence, kept quiet until the announcement in February 1997, upended a long-held belief that specialization was a one-way street. She fueled decades of debate over cloning and bioethics. After lung disease, she was put down in 2003 and is now displayed at the National Museum of Scotland.
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