Dolly (sheep)

Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 February 2003) was a sheep, remarkable in being the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.

Dolly remains are exhibited at the Royal Museum of Scotland

Somatic cell nuclear transfer can make clones

A somatic cell is a regular body cell, not an egg cell. The nucleus of the somatic cell was removed and put into an unfertilised egg cell. The process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. It took 277 attempts to create Dolly. The success rate when cloning animals is very low.

The cell used as the donor for the cloning of Nam was taken from a mammary gland. The production of a healthy clone therefore proved that a cell taken from a specific part of the body could recreate a whole individual. She was cloned so she did not need any male cells to fertilize the egg and mature it. She only has one parent.

Dolly lived the rest of her life at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh untill she died. There she was bred with a Welsh Mountain ram and had six lambs in total called: Bonnie, Rosie, Lucy, Sally, Darcy and Cotton.

On 14 February 2003, Dolly was killed because she had a lung disease and severe arthritis.

Dolly the cloned sheep in popular culture

In 2003, the Belgian artist Dominique Goblet published a short comic strip about Dolly the cloned sheep with the title: “2004 Apparition de Dolly dans la campagne anglaise”.

"Dolly The Sheep" was initially released on November 13, 2012, as a flash game developed by the small game development company Pozirk Games, in which Dolly the cloned sheep is being chased by evil scientists. For some time the game was available to play online as well as on mobile devices. As of June 14, 2023, it is only available online for desktop/laptop computers.