Ian Wilmut Interview (page: 3 / 6) Pioneer of Cloning	Print Interview

You talk about "we" a lot. I take it your spouse is an important factor.

Ian Wilmut: Absolutely. We met at high school. In those days, Scarborough had separate-sex schools, so we weren't at school together strictly, but met at that time. We stayed in touch whilst I was at university, and my wife was working somewhere else. We married after I graduated, so that we were in Cambridge together. We had our first child after the second year, and a second child once it was clear that I had a post-doctoral fellowship to stay on. We debated what we would do if we had children of the same sex. We felt that if that happened to us we would adopt, because then you help a child that's stuck a little bit, and have the sex of the children that you want. We adopted a son, so now we have three children.

Is your wife at all interested in your field?

Ian Wilmut: Her original subjects at school were physical sciences. She did maths, physics and chemistry. She had no particular training in this; she became interested in it through living with me for 30 years.

Do you use her as a sounding board?

Ian Wilmut: Sometimes, because we have very different views.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I don't have a religious faith, but my wife is now an elder of the Church of Scotland; she does have a very strong religious faith. And so, on some of the ethical issues, I would put to her, what do you think about this? And, we don't necessarily expect to agree, obviously. But, I can get help from her on the way to discuss things and describe things, which is very important. These are very complicated issues and difficult to describe.

You're dealing with technology that raises difficult moral issues. Do you come down on opposite sides?

Ian Wilmut: Not often. She has a different perspective. Over 30 years we've probably come together a little bit. The other thing which I think is important in a slightly different perspective, is that my wife's never had a career, in a formal sense. She's brilliant with young children. For a while she ran a play group and looked after children in the village. She's always done a lot of things with charities, with women's organizations, and the church. She's a busy lady. But she hasn't had the same sort of demands that are made on my time now. That makes it very much easier.

Because she's not part of the scientific community, I imagine she can relate to what you're doing in very human and everyday terms.

Ian Wilmut: Absolutely. In this particular case it has been important for us.

You say the laboratory at what became the Roslin Institute was under-financed when you started there. What were the challenges there?

Ian Wilmut: Paperwork, bureaucracy and persuading people.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You'll either think I'm very persistent, or very unimaginative because I think it took about nine years to actually get the surgical facilities that we really wanted. We could do some things beforehand, but it took about nine years to sort of launch and to really get the excellent facilities, which you have, which are world-class, but that's the sort of response time of the system: very, very slow.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

In doing this, you were writing proposals?

Ian Wilmut: Yes, and helping other people and talking to assessment committees. In government terms, it was a fairly large amount of money. The total costs would have been about a million dollars. Quite a lot of money.

Was it frustrating to want to get your hands on this stuff and have to sit there and beg?

Ian Wilmut: Absolutely. And you never know how long to go on being an optimist. You face a situation where there is going to be a committee two or three months hence, so you think maybe that will sort it out. You go through that committee and then something else appears. You never know how long to persist or whether to sort of throw in the towel and go away and do something different. We just persisted all the way.

When you first came to Roslin, weren't you working in a different direction?

Ian Wilmut: I started on a completely different area. It's scenario biology, which hasn't had a fraction as much notice. When I was at Cambridge I'd become fascinated by a particular question. Quite a proportion of embryos which are formed at fertilization die. It's a particularly high proportion in humans. Some estimates are that more than half die. Why? For several years I worked on trying to understand that. It was very difficult to work with.

Why?

Ian Wilmut: The reproductive system is sort of flexible in the way in which fertilization takes place, the way in which the potential mother will begin to produce hormones in response to changes in nutrition or temperature. An animal can reproduce in a great variety of different environments, but the price it pays is that on a certain proportion of occasions it will fail. Overall that's a net gain. It's much, much better to be able to reproduce at 70 percent efficiency in an enormous range of environments, rather than 100 percent efficiency in only one. Because if the environment changed, you're gone.

If, in the species we were working with, 30 percent of the embryos are dying, let's say five percent of it could be because of changes in nutrition. So you're dissecting it down to the individual issues. Very difficult indeed. In human medicine I think it is practicable, because the monitoring, and the interest and the motivation is so much greater. People are able to identify some of these factors, and are helping more women to have children successfully.

But in animal science?

Ian Wilmut: I think it's been put to one side. It's very difficult to cope with.

How did this lead you to cloning?

Ian Wilmut: There was a major change in the institute.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The institute wanted to bring in molecular biology. As I said, biologists have discovered molecules, and this is becoming a very important thing. And in being able to change genes in animals, you need to work with embryos. And very, very unusually, but I was essentially told to stop working on the cause of embryo loss, and to begin working on this area. An instruction which I deeply resented, deeply, deeply resented. Scientists don't like being told what to do at all.

You could have left, what made you stay?

Ian Wilmut: I'm very cautious, I suspect we both are. We had children in high school, which is a critical age for them. The opportunity that came along though, was to work in molecular biology, in modern genetics. After a few months of working with the microbiologists for the first time, that is when I began to understand the power of genetics. We're talking about 1983.

Was that a sudden breakthrough for you?

Ian Wilmut: A steady evolution. Fifteen years later, I'm heavily committed and impassioned about it. I think this area of biology is just exploding. I'm privileged to be in it at the right time.

If someone hadn't come along and said, stop doing what you're doing, would we have had Dolly?

Ian Wilmut: You probably would, but through somebody else. There are other labs around the world -- one at Texas A&M which subsequently moved to Salt Lake City -- and one of them would have had the good fortune at some point, not too much later.

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