ROSLIN, Scotland -- If sheep could read the newspapers, Dolly, the queen of clones, might be jealous about now.
Dolly is the ewe, you know, who was the first successful adult-mammal clone, born July 5, 1996. Since then, she's led the life of a star.
But now comes the news this week that an anonymous millionaire is donating $2.3 million to researchers at Texas A&M; University to find a way to clone his much-beloved pound dog, a 12-year-old border collie/husky mix named Missy.
Will the Dolly spotlight fade?
Not anytime soon, it appears. Even Mark Westhusin, lead researcher on the "Missyplicity" project, cautions that little is known about dogs' reproductive physiology, so cloning Missy will be harder than cloning a sheep.
Dr. Harry Griffin, assistant director of Scotland's Roslin Institute, where Dolly was cloned, said yesterday that he thought it would be better for the millionaire to "buy a good-quality pedigree dog and spend the millions of dollars more wisely."
Roslin has had "30 or 40 requests by individuals to clone their pets and turned them down," Griffin said. "It encourages people to think you can resurrect an animal, and you can't. It's not possible to re-create an individual."
The genes may be identical, but, like Dolly, the cloned Missy would have behavior and personality of her own.
Griffin should know. As a visit to the celebrity sheep shows, Dolly is one of a kind.
The seven-mile drive from Edinburgh to the Roslin Institute in Midlothian passes through field after field of grazing cattle, with the hills of the Central Lowlands as a backdrop. Much of this farmland is owned by Roslin, a major research center for the study of farm animals.
Roslin remained in scientific obscurity until Dolly, a Finn Dorset ewe, was born, the result of a new technique of cloning. Overnight, the world traveled to catch a glimpse of Roslin's star attraction, and she's been in the limelight since.
Approaching the institute, an unassuming sign tells you you've arrived. A single security bar, with a small gatehouse, temporarily halts you, before you drive past laboratories to the main reception. An aerial shot would showlow-rise, sprawling buildings on 150 acres of farmland and, tucked in a corner, the brick barn where Dolly lives.
You drive five minutes farther, accompanied by Griffin, and reach another security bar. Griffin announces his presence into an intercom, and the bar is raised. All around is deserted; the scientists are at work in their labs.
Dolly's home exudes none of the glamour of her namesake, Dolly Parton. The ewe lives in a cream-painted building with a corrugated tin roof. This is a barn of clones achieved through different processes. Only Dolly was cloned from an adult cell rather than from, say, a fetal cell.
Griffin disappears to get a key for the padlock on the metal gates at the barn door. Dolly is not insured, he says. There are no security guards. For a sheep with celebrity status, she enjoys little of the razzmatazz of stardom.
As Griffin unlocks the gates announcing our arrival, heads turn. Sixteen heads, to be precise.
Fourteen cream-colored sheep and two black ones are housed in pens with straw beds. Only one immediately comes forward, and utters a very loud bleat by way of greeting. Dolly.
"She's as vocal a sheep as I've ever known," says John Bracken, one of her keepers. "She got to recognize people in ways you wouldn't normally expect a sheep to be like." Like a dog.
Dolly is round and cuddly. She likes having her ears tickled and warms to affection. She's a sheep with personality and knows how to get what she wants -- usually extra food.
To get her to pay attention to visitors' cameras, she's given treats, protein pellets. "This must be like caviar to a sheep reared on hay," Griffin says.
Dolly knows "she's the more interesting of the sheep and plays up to that," says Griffin.
She plays up to it so much that she developed a slight weight problem last year, and had to be put on a diet when researchers decided to see whether a clone could give birth to a healthy lamb.
Dolly is penned with that lamb, Bonnie, born at 4 a.m. April 13 this year. Unlike her mother, Bonnie was conceived and born naturally. Her father was David, a Welsh mountain ram.
Dolly started life as a reconstructed egg, floating in a pink culture serum in a flask. The egg was created from an individual cell, taken from a 6-year-old Finn Dorset ewe, that was fused with an unfertilized egg from which the genetic material was removed. The cells were cultured in the lab before being implanted into a surrogate Scottish Blackface ewe.
The process is not new, but the method is.
"You can genetically modify cells in these sort of flasks in a very precise way," says Griffin. "You can add genes, not just add them anywhere to your DNA, but you can actually insert them at a specific point. In a culture of 10 billion letters of the genetic code, you can alter just one of them."
The Roslin Institute's work has far-reaching benefits for the farming community and the general population. In the future "You could consider cloning for use in farm-animal production," says Griffin, "maybe to multiply your very best dairy cow."
(If cloning became commonplace, telling one animal from another would become more difficult. One way of telling with sheep would be to take nose prints. Nose prints are the sheep equivalent of fingerprints and are not wholly genetically determined.)
The researchers on the Missyplicity project hope to contribute to animal science, specifically to the development of canine contraceptives and infertility treatments.
Medicine also benefits from Roslin's work. Human proteins, in great demand for the treatment of a variety of diseases, can be produced in cell culture. At present, some are purified from blood, which is costly and risky because of potential contamination.
Roslin's work, over the next three years, is to genetically modify pigs to produce organs for transplant that won't be rejected by human recipients.
Nor is Dolly's work over, though the team leader, Professor Ian Wilmut, says, "It's important that she gets as normal a life as she can, and we're not going to do a lot of biological studies with her."
Like some other royal women, Dolly does charity work. When she was 10 months old, she was sheared, and her fleece was donated to Britain's Cystic Fibrosis Trust. (World champion Scottish shearer, Geordie Bayne, from Selkirk, performed the task very carefully. Sheep can experience a lot of stress when sheared, so the Roslin team had a vet standing by. However, according to Griffin, "She seemed to enjoy the process.")
The "BBC Clothes Show" then asked viewers to design a sweater for the wool. After the winning design was picked, the fleece was knitted, and the resulting sweater is now part of a permanent exhibition at London's Science Museum, and has been touring the world.
Dolly was sheared again this May, and the fleece went to benefit Scotland's Cystic Fibrosis Trust.
Griffin is often asked what a day in the life of Dolly is like, and he says he's tempted to reply: "She was woken up and brought coffee, and then read the Financial Times."
The reality is, she leads a very leisurely existence. Food arrives at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Visitors -- representatives of the media mostly, as the general public is not allowed to see her -- arrive almost every day. "She's certainly the most photographed sheep of all time," says Griffin, "and comes to the camera rather than escaping it."
She has had the offer of a U.S. chat show, but had to decline because of regulations. At present, she spends all her time in the barn, with Bonnie and the other clones for company. In the future, she may be let out in the field for two to three hours at a time. There is a greater risk of infection outside, however, and she will need to be supervised.
Dolly's lifestyle, though limited, probably will mean she'll enjoy a long life. Few sheep are allowed to live out their potential life span of 11 to 13 years. Most are killed within their first year and eaten.Sheep are also often put down when they lose their teeth. In her privileged position, Dolly may get false teeth, if it's considered an appropriate option at the time.
In the meantime, Dolly lives in relative luxury. It may not be Hollywood, as befits her celebrity status, but in sheep terms, life's pretty good. And those of the public who can't see her in life can go to the Scottish Museum in Edinburgh and see her in death: Dolly is to be immortalized for all time. The Roslin Institute has a taxidermist ready and waiting.
Pub Date: 8/29/98