Musician, actress, philanthropist, and businesswoman – Dolly Parton had done it all.
But perhaps her most unusual accolade was having the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the Sheep, named after her.
This might seem like an unusual choice from the team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.
However, there was an important reason for choosing the name Dolly – and it all came down to the type of cell the sheep was cloned from.
Dolly was grown using a nucleus from a single mammary cell, and with Dolly Parton known for her generous bust, the name seemed like an obvious choice.
While you might think that the late country star would take offence, Dolly Parton said she was ‘flattered’.
Speaking in an interview with Nature, Professor Ian Wilmut, the late scientist who led the team at Roslin, explained: ‘Dolly Parton’s manager was reported to have said “There is no such thing as baaaaad publicity”.’
Musician, actress, philanthropist, and businesswoman – Dolly Parton had done it all. But perhaps her most unusual accolade was having the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the Sheep, named after her
While you might think that the late country star would take offence, Dolly Parton revealed that she was ‘flattered’
Dolly was the world’s first cloned mammal, and started her life as a single cell in a test tube.
A nucleus was taken from a cell from the mammary gland of a Finn Dorset sheep, before being placed into an empty egg cell from a Scottish Blackface Sheep.
Once normal development was confirmed in a lab at six days, the embryo was transferred into a surrogate mother.
Finally, Dolly was born on 5 July 1996.
According to Professor Wilmut, who sadly passed away in 2023, the name was chosen by one of Roslin’s scientists, John Bracken.
‘Dolly was christened by John Bracken, one of the men who paced anxiously about day and night as we waited for the birth of the lamb,’ he explained.
Upon learning the name, Dolly Parton said she was ‘flattered’.
In an interview with The Guardian, she said: ‘I was flattered. You know, when the scientists cloned Dolly the sheep, they used the mammary glands.
Professor Ian Wilmut (pictured with Dolly in 2003), the late scientist who led the team at Roslin, explained: ‘ Dolly Parton’s manager was reported to have said “There is no such thing as baaaaad publicity”‘
‘That’s what they call them … glands … the boobs.
‘They said: “Oh, we have this sheep, Dolly …” Everybody always played up to these [points to her chest], so that’s why we had Dolly the sheep.’
Having lent her name to the world’s first cloned mammal, you might wonder if Dolly Parton herself would have liked to be cloned.
However, she shrugged this idea off in 2024, saying ‘I don’t want to be cloned myself.’
She added: ‘I want to get on out of here when I can.
‘We already get a lot of Dolly lookalikes, a lot of Dolly drag queens.
‘I can just send them down to the store instead of me.’
Since Dolly the Sheep’s birth, cloning has come on leaps and bounds.
The National Human Genome Research Institute explained: ‘Two years later, researchers in Japan cloned eight calves from a single cow, but only four survived.
‘Besides cattle and sheep, other mammals that have been cloned from somatic cells include: cat, deer, dog, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat.
‘In addition, a rhesus monkey has been cloned by embryo splitting.’
HOW WAS DOLLY THE SHEEP CREATED?
Dolly was the only surviving lamb from 277 cloning attempts and was created from a mammary cell taken from a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep.
She was created in 1996 at a laboratory in Edinburgh using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
The pioneering technique involved transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into an unfertilised egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed.
Dolly the sheep made history 20 years ago after being cloned at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Pictured is Dolly in 2002
An electric shock stimulated the hybrid cell to begin dividing and generate an embryo, which was then implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother.
Dolly was the first successfully produced clone from a cell taken from an adult mammal.
Dolly’s creation showed that genes in the nucleus of a mature cell are still able to revert back to an embryonic totipotent state – meaning the cell can divide to produce all of the difference cells in an animal.
