Hello, Dolly!

Never has a celebrity been so lavished upon, and never has one been so carefully watched by media. More than your typical diva, she was a living symbol of progress. Dolly, in her magnificence, represents a change in the times. However, it should be noted that Dolly, while famous and fabulous in her own right, was a sheep just like any other Finn-Dorset. Excepting one small factor. . .
 Dolly was originally a cell from the udder of an older sheep, frozen in quiescence, implanted in another type of sheep. In other words, Dolly was a "test tube" lamb, born of the genius of Ian Wilmut and company, and the labor efforts of one Scottish Blackface sheep in Scotland, 1996.
That summer, Dolly shocked the world, when, weighing in at 6.6 kg, she was born healthy and robust. The world's first taste of the awesome power of modern science and stem cells delivered by an average old sheep in a little barn tucked away in Scotland. When the news reached the media, fear broke out (an odd reaction to a lamb, even if she was a little hefty) and headlines shouted of apocalyptic deeds, flesh-eating beasts, and other nonsense of no relation to the oddly outgoing and friendly, cloned sheep. Americans in particular reacted with shock and horror, as the development had apparently "'come out of nowhere' (Dolly was not born in America, after all)" (18). Ignorant of much of the scientific goings on in the rest of the world, Americans cried distress, Time Magazine even reporting that "one doesn't expect  Dr. Frankenstein to show up in a wool sweater, baggy parka, soft British accent and the face of a bank clerk" to describe Wilmut (19). A picture had been painted, correct or otherwise.
Dolly lived and thrived, and the media went wild. Then, when her decline began (too early for normalcy, but from common conditions that would have occurred to any sheep used to being stressed by media presence, spoiled, and confined to a barn) the media relished in the "deadly" effects of cloning and dangers of stem cells. What went unheard in all the brouhaha was the real story, the one of a dedicated team of scientists and a bonny little sheep who would be born, live, give birth (to several healthy lambs), and die a quiet, norma death. Instead, questions of ethics, politics, and science bombarded Roslin, Scotland from every corner of the globe, the most important of which being this:

What do we do after Dolly?

Authors Ian Wilmut (who was there from the beginning), and Roger Highfield attempt to explain these next steps and the questions Dolly's life and death provoke in their book After Dolly The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning. I'll be reading the unique perspective for the next few weeks, and seeing what I can learn about stem cells and the controversy and argument that surround their use.