Dolly the sheep (Edinburgh Museum)

Dolly (July 5, 1996 – February 14, 2003), was a female domestic sheep remarkable in being the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was born on July 5, 1996 and she lived until the age of six,and was dubbed "the world's most famous sheep" by Scientific American.

The cell used as the donor for the cloning of Dolly was taken from a mammary gland, and the production of a healthy clone therefore proved that a cell taken from a specific part of the body could recreate a whole individual. As Dolly was cloned from part of a mammary gland, she was named after the famously busty country western singer Dolly Parton.

Dolly lived for her entire life at the Roslin Institute. There she was bred with a Welsh Mountain ram and produced six lambs in total. Her first lamb called Bonnie, was born in April 1998. The next year Dolly produced twin lambs Sally and Rosie, and she gave birth to triplets Lucy, Darcy and Cotton in the year after that. In the autumn of 2001, at the age of five, Dolly developed arthritis and began to walk stiffly, but this was successfully treated with anti-inflammatory drugs.

On February 14, 2003, Dolly was euthanised because of a progressive lung disease. A Finn Dorset such as Dolly has a life expectancy of around 11 to 12 years, but Dolly lived to be only six years of age. A post-mortem examination showed she had a form of lung cancer called Jaagsiekte that is a fairly common disease of sheep and is caused by the retrovirus JSRV. Roslin scientists stated that they did not think there was a connection with Dolly's being a clone, and that other sheep in the same flock had died of the same disease. Such lung diseases are a particular danger for sheep kept indoors, and Dolly had to sleep inside for security reasons.

However, some have speculated that a contributing factor to Dolly's death was that she could have been born with a genetic age of six years, the same age as the sheep from which she was cloned. One basis for this idea was the finding that Dolly's telomeres were short, which typically is a result of the aging process. However, the Roslin Institute have stated that intensive health screening did not reveal any abnormalities in Dolly that could have come from advanced aging.