Ian Wilmut Interview (page: 5 / 6) Pioneer of Cloning	Print Interview

After you planted this embryo in the surrogate mother, were there sleepless nights waiting to see whether this was going to go?

Ian Wilmut: I suppose there were. We transfer the egg after a week. We use ultrasound to monitor pregnancy, in just the same way as you would in a human patient. So at 50 days we knew there was just one pregnancy. A sad fact that isn't mentioned quite so often, is that half of all pregnancies fail, don't go to term, the equivalent of a miscarriage. So the probabilities were not very high. I don't do the ultrasound myself, so I was just waiting for the call to say, "It's still there, it's still looking really good." People have an idea that all of a sudden there'll be a click and you'll go from having no lamb, to having Dolly. In reality, what happens is that for a hundred days you're monitoring this thing, and it isn't quite such an explosive surprise. It's almost a sigh of relief that the lamb has made it and is obviously so healthy.

When was Dolly born?

Ian Wilmut: July 5th, 1996.

Did everybody celebrate?

Ian Wilmut: This is really strange, because the answer is no. I actually bought some champagne and it was in the fridge, but this is a team effort. My colleague Keith Campbell was on holiday, and at the time I felt that it was more important that the team celebrated together. We tried to wait until Keith and everybody else had come back. With hindsight, that was a mistake. What we should have done is celebrate twice, once when he was away and once when he came back.

You kept this a secret.

Ian Wilmut: The reason's quite simple. The particular journal, Nature, will not publish things if they are in the public domain. It's trying to hype the publicity of the announcement. If we had discussed it in public, it would not get a proper scientific review. And, of course, my career ultimately depends on publishing scientific papers.

It also took us a number of weeks to do the tests to prove her parentage, and to confirm that we really had done what we were describing. There were a lot of other lambs born at the same time. And then it took us until the 22nd of November to prepare the manuscript.

The remaining three or four months are taken up by the journal. The paper is sent out to people to assess, to referee. They make comments and we made some minor changes and then it went in for publication. If you asked a hundred scientists at random if they've had a paper published within six months of the experiment, they'd tell you it's usually a bit more than that, eight or nine months. Not many have got a publication in that period of time, it was very quick.

In all of those months, did you have any inkling of the momentous kind of reaction that would come from this?

Ian Wilmut: No. We expected some reaction.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We expected probably most of the questions, but not the scale of the reaction. You know, we were visited by almost tens of TV companies, straight off. The number of phone calls which you had was logged and it ran into hundreds, thousands, probably, just within a week or two. Still now, there's just a steady trickle of requests for interviews, and that's what, 15 months or so later. At the time, the peak time, The New York Times sent not just one journalist, but one from Moscow, one from Frankfurt, one from New York, and a photographer from New York. It was just way beyond our greatest expectation.

What do you attribute it to?

Ian Wilmut: I'm never quite sure. I think the main thing is probably just the realization that this was now a biological possibility, something people had written about for a number of years. And there's a little bit of fear and anxiety, because the stories that are written about it tend to have a bad element to them. For some people the whole idea has bad associations. You know...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The Boys from Brazil, the Nazis from Germany, and that sort of thing. And you could put a good spin on it. You could say -- it's way too academic -- but let's say somebody might write about, let's say a case where there is a child, a very young child who is killed in an accident, and reproducing that. And getting people to think about whether that's something that they're comfortable with. That in itself raises a lot of ethical issues, but it's not presented in a frightening sort of way, is it? So many of the reactions that I have -- just in terms of pure number of people giving this reaction -- are of governments misusing the technology and of dictators misusing the technology. And I think those are by far the least important things to come from this technology.

Many people associate this kind of genetic research with science fiction. People make that leap right away.

Ian Wilmut: Yes, maybe. It is always very difficult to judge when you're closely involved with something.

Is it possible that science sometimes is too insular, too focused on what is happening in the lab and not looking broadly enough?

Ian Wilmut: I think that we do understand, to a considerable extent. The difficulty is in getting interest. Megan and Morac were born from a slightly simpler cell, almost exactly a year before Dolly, and the publicity was almost exactly a year before. We published in the same journal. We put out press releases and discussed the probability that it would be possible to copy adult animals. And there was so much less interest in that.

So, whilst I would be totally in favor of discussing research with anybody, at almost any time, the practical difficulty is in getting people to discuss things which are still hypothetical. It comes on with a bump once it becomes a reality. That's something that we have to live with.

Science is unpredictable. And if you could say something is going to be achieved on the 15th of June in the year 2001, we could plan from late 1999 how to use it. It would be so much easier, but it isn't like that. When should people first have started discussing this? When people first worked with frogs in the '60s? When it was first applied to mice and sheep in the early '80s? When? It's a real practical difficulty. I'm absolutely not hostile to the idea that society should be involved in these sorts of comments. But in the end, you can only make the ultimate judgments and publicity as things happen.

What was life like during that period of the immediate response?

Ian Wilmut: Very hard work. We got a massive number of requests for interviews. Television, radio, the phone to people overseas, newspaper interviews and so on. We do get a bit of preparation for that. The publicity that I mentioned in relation to Megan and Morac the year before had been a help. But in a situation like that, there's a need to focus totally on what you want to say, in the two minutes you're going to get. You really have to focus on what you want to say. It is hard work.

Has both the substance and the quantity of the reaction had an impact on how you're going to be approaching things in the future, and how you deal with the public?

Ian Wilmut: I don't think so. I've always enjoyed talking about work, and I've talked to a whole variety of different audiences all along. It's not an obligatory part of my work, but I've talked to general groups. The extent to which I do it has changed, but not the principle of doing it.

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