It was a toss-up whether the man who cloned Dolly the sheep ended up as a farmer or a scientist. Dr Ian Wilmut, who made world news in 1996 with Dolly's arrival, could just as well have spent his days ploughing fields and planting beet.
He comes to Dublin next Wednesday, January 19th, to deliver a Science Today lecture organised by The Irish Times and the Royal Dublin Society. He will talk about his new book, The Second Creation, and how he and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh turned cloning into headline news.
Born in Warwickshire in 1945, he started his academic career as an agriculture student at Nottingham University. His ambition was to become a farmer, but this gradually changed as his studies progressed. There was no turning point or dramatic event, he says. The transition was "not something I actually remember. I suppose it was a progressive thing."
It was, however, helped along by two factors. He readily admits to having absolutely no commercial or business skills, essential for any farmer hoping to cope with CAP reform, milk quotas and livestock premiums. He also found, after a summer working with a senior British researcher, Dr E.J.C. Polge, that embryology was what he really wanted to do, and so he became a scientist.
Dr Wilmut readily acknowledges that he was taken aback by the public and media interest in Dolly, but in fact he was not a complete stranger to celebrity. In 1973 he became the first scientist to freeze a calf embryo, thaw it and replant it in a surrogate mother, resulting in the world's first "frozen calf", a Hereford-Friesian aptly named Frostie.
This work attracted much media attention from as far away as New Zealand, but nothing really could have prepared him for the onslaught which followed Dolly's arrival. "I personally was surprised, I have to admit," he says. Discussing it soon afterward with his wife, Vivienne, he assured her that it would all blow over after six months. He now wonders whether the public and media interest will ever die down.
He was doubly surprised at the response given the fact that he and the team at Roslin, whose efforts and contribution he repeatedly acknowledges, had already successfully cloned four other animals, Welsh mountain ewes, Megan and Morag, and two rams, Taffy and Tweed.
Dolly, however, was fundamentally different. Megan and the earlier animals were cloned using either embryo or foetal cells, fresh genetic material that had not yet begun to change or "differentiate" into mature brain, liver or muscle cells.
Dolly was cloned from a mature cell taken from a six-year-old sheep, "old" genetic material from a source that had long ago differentiated into one specific cell type. At a stroke, the Roslin team had showed that cell differentiation could be reversed. The genetic material taken from the cell reverted to its original undifferentiated state and the DNA again behaved as though it was freshly mixed after the meeting of a sperm and egg.
"The impact of that on the scientific community is massive," he acknowledges.
Dolly's arrival proved a bombshell, and the news flew around the world. Dr Wilmut and his main collaborator, Dr Keith Campbell, were immediately catapulted in front of the cameras, and in the intervening years the media pull has hardly diminished.
Yet for the research group at Roslin there was no earthquake until the media became involved. "For the public, they picked up the paper and there was a picture of Dolly. For us there wasn't a single ecstatic moment," he says.
Dolly was the 277th cloning attempt using mature cells. The cells were first cultured for a week, then implanted, and they had to wait another 50 or 60 days to see whether a proper lamb was on the way, not a schedule that would keep one on the edge of one's seat.
The ink was hardly dry on Dolly's birth certificate before the possible cloning of humans, the growing of organs in tanks and the notion of designer babies began to be reported. These somewhat excitable claims were helped along by the likes of Dr Richard Seed, a US physicist who claimed he was ready to clone a human if a lab could be provided.
Some commentators also began to talk about the Roslin team and their front man, Dr Wilmut, as the creators of a monster technology that trampled underfoot the accepted ethical limits to proper research.
Asked whether he felt personally hurt by such reportage, he acknowledges: "Yes must be the answer." He says he was perhaps even more worried about how these views have remained to the fore. "The concern is with the obsession with the sensationalism. There seems to be a pressure in the media to come up with sensational stories. That is disturbing. There could ultimately be a price to be paid for it," he says.
Headlines had a powerful effect on politicians, who could be scared into cutting funding or banning research that could lead to the betterment of human health.
Despite all the emotion surrounding the issue and the ethical questions that follow it like a shadow, he has not been barracked on the street or accosted by those opposed to the research and its powerful implications.
"We share a lot of the concerns," he says. "Clearly there are differing views on this, but none of us is a supporter of the idea of copying people." In Second Creation he writes: "Human cloning has grabbed people's imagination, but that is merely a diversion and one we personally regret and find distasteful. We did not make Dolly for that. Still less did we intend to produce vast flocks of identical sheep."
Yet he is also strongly opposed to any talk of curbing the ongoing animal cloning research. "A point people should recognise is this sort of duality is common to many aspects of life. What I would advocate is the research should be very ambitious." There was a risk of misuse, but also great opportunities for positive advances.
He does not underestimate the tremendous power that will become available as the technology develops. The technology, he writes in his book, will "take humanity into a new age - one as significant, as time will tell, as our forebears' transition into the age of steam, of radio, or of nuclear power . . . In evil hands such power could be ghoulish. Ethically directed, the potential for doing good is immense."
Carrying around such a scientific legacy on one's shoulders might seem burdensome, yet Dr Wilmut shows no signs of it. He strikes one as someone who loves his work and wants to get on with it, but for the problem that celebrity keeps getting in the way.
He has no difficulty getting away from it all, however. "I live out in the country in a small village . . . I take a lot of photographs and am very fond of classical music." His children have grown up and moved on, but he and his wife enjoy long walks and birdwatching near their home.
He also admits to a fondness for whisky, nothing but peaty single malt from Scotland, and he also has a taste for wine. Even though he ended up in the laboratory, he can still draw strength and find refuge in the countryside where he might have spent his days as a farmer.
The Second Creation: The Age of Biological Control by the Scientists Who Cloned Dolly, by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge. Published by Headline, 362pp, £18.99 stg.
There is no charge to attend Dr Wilmut's lecture at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, January 19th, at the Concert Hall of the RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin. However, places must be booked which may be done by contacting Carol Power of the RDS on (01) 668-0866