THE history of science is often criticised for “Whiggishness” – offering airbrushed accounts of inexorable progress towards the truth. In reality, science is a haphazard and human activity, strewn with missteps, dead ends, serendipity and surprises.
The cloning of Dolly the sheep 20 years ago was just such an episode, as Ian Wilmut’s account of those tumultuous days reveals (see “The clone that changed my life: 20 years after Dolly the sheep“). It could easily have turned out very differently: but for a few turns of fate, Dolly might never have been born.
It is possible that efforts to clone an animal from an adult cell would have been abandoned, or achieved later by somebody else. We might now be toasting a decade since Betsy the cow rather than two since Dolly.
Twenty years is enough distance to get some perspective. Dolly’s birth inspired talk of medical miracles as well as dire warnings about human cloning. Neither played out quite as expected – though, happily, the optimists were closer to the mark. The technique used to create Dolly was instrumental in the development of the stem cell treatments that are now in clinical trials, as well as an amazing therapy that promises to cure a class of cruel genetic conditions called mitochondrial diseases.
Meanwhile, nobody has cloned a human being – at least as far as we know. That may in part be due to technical hurdles. But it also speaks of scientists’ self-restraint.
Which brings us to today. Advances in biotechnology still lead to exaggerated claims either way. The latest to inspire this reaction is gene editing, which could be used for good or ill and is causing no little confusion among regulators (see “Judge gene-edited crops by what they do, not how they are made“).
It would be Whiggish to claim that the Dolly story holds salutary lessons for gene editing, but there are a few take-home messages. One is that progress in biomedical science is slower and less linear than we imagine. Another is that just because something can be done does not mean it will be. Our view of gene editing will be very different in 20 years’ time.
This article appeared in print under the headline “What Dolly means today”
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