Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jumal Kiele and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and important

scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

20 years ago last month in July 1996,

Dolly the Sheep was born just 8 miles south of us here in Edinburgh at the

Roslin Institute the most famous sheep in the world and here you are

Professor Ian Wilmot the father of the sheep that has no sheep father. I think a lot of people imagine

that Dolly was the culmination of everything you'd ever wanted to achieve. But I know you

insisted that Dolly was only ever a means to an end, which was to work out how to control animal breeding.

So what I'm hoping to find out in the next half hour or so is how you came to create the first clone of an adult sheep, what Dolly meant to you and what happened after she was born. So ladies and gentlemen, please could you join me in welcoming Professor Ian Wilmot to this recording of the Life Scientific here at the Edinburgh Festival.

And of course a warm welcome from me too. So Ian as I mentioned Dolly the Sheep was born not far from here. Seven months later she became a global media star and so of course by association did you when the scientific paper

describing what you and the team at the Ross Institute had done was published.

Were you surprised by the way the world reacted to this news, the news of

Dolly's birth?

I think I'm very naive, Jim.

A month or two later, my wife and I usually visited her mother at Easter.

She lived in Scarborough.

We went for a walk along the beach and I said to my wife

Don't worry. It all go away by the autumn. It will have gone and here we are 20 years later

And I need to know how Dolly reacted to all this media attention. Well, she became spoiled.

The photographers soon discovered that she were even less obedient than people who were being photographed.

...