Ian Wilmut Interview (page: 2 / 6) Pioneer of Cloning	Print Interview

So was it after these lab jobs in the summer that you started getting serious about the formal study of biology?

Ian Wilmut: That's right. When I went back it was absolutely clear.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In the last year as undergraduates we did a short research project which we built around the course work. And, I worked on the methods of recovering embryos, increasing the yield of embryos from new lambs, working with a postgraduate student. I guess that was the first time I was up through the night, giving them treatments, taking blood samples and so on. And using the new experience that I had about embryos. The university that I was at at that time, there was nobody who had seen an embryo. And so, I used this skill that I'd got. Remember, "embryos" sometimes gives the impression of something which has already got heads and legs and so on, is recognizably a sheep. This is not like that. And so, I brought into the university the training that I'd had away at the research lab.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Once you started with this kind of research, did you have any idea where your work in embryology could go?

Ian Wilmut: No. As a Ph.D. student I had a chance to do a project working with sperm. At that stage I moved to the University of Cambridge, working with Chris Polge, who is best known because he identified the compounds which provide protection during freezing of cells.

The particular niche which was open for me was to try to understand why it was that the same procedures which enable us to freeze and thaw bull sperm effectively wouldn't work for boar sperm.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's always been very important and exciting to try to understand the basic mechanisms as well as I can, and then to seek an application. So, I'd like to think that I wrote an essay on freezing -- the technical name for freezing cells is cryobiology, "cryo" being low temperature -- which would have stood comparison with many at that time. Drawing on research from all sorts of other cells, different species and so on. But, at the same time with Chris Polge I was going out onto one or two pig farms to see whether the method that we developed was going to work or not. And, bridging that gap has always been something which has been important to me.

What was the practical application?

Ian Wilmut: You can make comparisons between the pigs that are here now in 1998, with ones which were there in say 1958. It lets you measure of whether or not there is genetic progress. Whether the pigs really are different as a result of all the selection, or whether all you're doing is feeding them better and that's the reason why they perform better.

You can also use it as a healthier way of importing genes. You might like to import some pigs from Britain. One of the healthiest ways to do that is to collect semen from a boar to freeze it. You can study the boar to make sure that he doesn't show any infections over as long an incubation period as you wish, and then ship the semen to the United States. It's cheap and safe, from a health point of view.

Were you caught up in the excitement of the genetics field?

Ian Wilmut: Actually, not at all, no. My interest was still very much in the gametes and the embryos. And I had a different fortunate opportunity. My wife and I were hoping to work overseas. The particular post we applied for, we were successful, but the money wasn't available for a number of months, and we weren't able to bridge that financial gap. We were offered the post in Cambridge and stayed. It was during that period that we produced the first calf from a frozen embryo, applying the same sorts of things I'd learned with boar sperm. That laid the foundations for a different agricultural application, and also a medical one, because the procedures we followed in 1973 are essentially the same ones used to freeze human embryos as part of fertility treatment programs.

What did you call the calf?

Ian Wilmut: Frosty. Chris Polge had been involved a number of years earlier in producing the first calf from a frozen semen, using his new freezing technologies. His calf was Frosty One and mine was Frosty Two.

What was the big discovery there?

Ian Wilmut: Until then, almost all of the freezing had been done with single cells. Embryos are already small groups of cells, beginning to function together, and quite a lot larger. The volume of an embryo would be I guess a hundred times the volume of a typical cell. It's by far the largest cell in the body. And things get that much more difficult if you're working with bigger cells. So people had not previously been able to work with embryos.

So it was exciting from a cryobiology point of view, and also from an agricultural point of view. Even in human patients when you're trying to just produce one child, there is this occasional response which can produce up to seven or eight fetuses. Extraordinary variability in the response to the same treatment. The same thing happens in all mammals. Now, what this means if you're wanting to do a transfer from one animal into another is that you get no embryos, or 30, and before we had freezing you needed to put them into another animal that day, within a few hours.

From a commercial point of view it was very difficult. If you knew that somebody was bringing in a particularly valuable cow, did you arrange four recipients, five recipients, 20? How many? Once the techniques were refined, it was possible to arrange, let's say six recipients, which is probably the typical figure of eggs that you recover, and to store any that were recovered above that. So it's had a quite significant impact in animal breeding through embryo transfer.

Were there a lot of failures before the technique was perfected?

Ian Wilmut: It was actually the other way around. The two calves that we had were from very early on in the research. And then we spent a period wondering why we couldn't do it again. Actually, the refinement of the technique was left to a successor of mine, Steve Willitsen, a Dane who has made a number of important contributions to embryo research.

Following the experience with the freezing technique, was there a clear path to the next step?

Ian Wilmut: It was one of a small number of opportunities. There was an institute in Edinburgh which was associated with animal genetics. I knew that the physiology techniques I was associated with could contribute to genetic research. That's the reason we went up to Edinburgh in 1973 and have been there ever since.

When you got there, was your intuition confirmed, that this was the right place to be?

Ian Wilmut: No, they were extremely slow in building up resources. Professional career advisors would probably say we should have moved. But we lived about 20 miles south of Edinburgh in a beautiful place. You never have a perfect set of things in life, but our children were roughly three and five, we had a nice place to live, a good place to bring up children, and we decided to settle for that. We've been very fortunate, and over 20 years the Roslin Institute has developed.

Do you think that decision set you apart from a lot of other scientists?

Ian Wilmut: I don't know. Maybe we were just indecisive.

Ian Wilmut Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6