The scientists who produced Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep, are at loggerheads over who deserves credit for the breakthrough.
The debate was ignited by an admission this week from Professor Ian Wilmut -- the scientist widely credited for the research -- that he did not create the animal after all.
Speaking at an employment tribunal in Edinburgh, Scotland, Wilmut said he did not develop the technology or conduct the experiments, and played only a supervisory role.
hello dolly
The birth of Dolly in July 1996 was regarded as a leap forward in cloning technology and triggered a surge of similar efforts to clone other animals.
The work was published in the journal Nature in 1997 and rapidly made Wilmut, who led the research group at the Roslin Institute, one of the most high-profile scientists in the world.
At the tribunal, in which one of Wilmut's colleagues, Prim Singh, alleges bullying, the scientist said he did not play a trivial role in the project to clone Dolly and coordinated the work, but added that 66 percent of the credit should go to Professor Keith Campbell, a co-author on the 1997 paper.
But researchers close to the project say the scientists involved still have major disagreements over who deserves credit for cloning Dolly.
credit due
According to one source, all the credit for the breakthrough should go to Campbell, who left the Roslin Institute shortly after the paper was published.
Bill Ritchie, a lab technician, still working at Roslin, said all the cloning lab work that led to Dolly was done by him and another technician, Karen Mycock, so the credit should be theirs.
"It's been an ongoing argument since it happened. Everyone has their own different set of facts," said one scientist.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS