Research Ethics Grand Rounds

The birth of Dolly the sheep twenty years ago in 1996 has overshadowed much of the history of the science and techniques used to create her. This talk will look at the early development of nuclear transplantation techniques in the 1940s and 1950s, showing how they have always been intimately connected to medical outcomes rather than simply experiments to further basic understandings of development, as this early work has often been portrayed. This talk will also look at how nuclear transplantation became connected to the possibility of cloning humans, which happened in the late 1960s rather than in the 1990s, showing that social and cultural understandings of science (and ensuing anxieties) are not necessarily connected to particular scientific advances but rather rely on contexts and events outside the laboratory.