Taxidermied, encased behind plexiglass and slowly spinning on a wooden dais at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, UK, the world’s most famous sheep remains a public spectacle three decades after its birth.

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From that moment, on July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep was born, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.¹ – was destined for celebrity, and its mark on science is still evident in fields such as developmental biology and biotechnology. Dolly’s creation demonstrated that an adult cell can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state, opening up the possibility of creating stem cells from adult cells. Ten years later, in 2006, details of the first induced pluripotent stem cells were published.². The first therapies made from these cells were conditionally approved this year in Japan.

Reproductive cloning is now being used in agriculture to generate gene-edited polled cattle and pigs with organs that could be suitable for transplantation into humans. Additionally, an industry has emerged to create copies of prized pets, show animals, and sport horses.

But in one important respect, Dolly’s legacy is not what was anticipated in the frenetic weeks after news of her birth became public in 1997. From the beginning, much of the world’s media portrayed Dolly as a step toward the imminent creation of cloned humans. No such development has materialized.

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First, cloning a human being would raise countless ethical questions, not to mention formidable technical obstacles. The nuclear transfer technique that created Dolly was difficult to perform successfully on primates; The monkeys would not be cloned using this method until 2018.³. The success rate is too low to consider the method in humans and the risk of anomalies resulting from the process is too high.

However, other advances in reproductive technology have come at breakneck speed. Stem cell technology, boosted by Dolly’s birth, has led to the creation of models that mimic the human embryo and mouse eggs and sperm from stem cells. Researchers have also developed techniques to replace defective mitochondria in human embryos and are designing increasingly sophisticated artificial wombs. The past month has brought a new wave of excitement and concern about the potential use of advanced gene editing methods in embryos to create heritable genetic changes.^4,5.

past imperfect

There is a lot for audiences to process, particularly in the field of reproduction, where new technologies can be presented as the gateway to a dystopian future and can challenge our concepts of what it means to be human. The experience of Dolly and her guides could contain valuable lessons on how to deal with the current situation.

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The researchers who cloned Dolly, led by respected embryologist Ian Wilmut, were caught off guard by the press frenzy surrounding her birth, says Bruce Whitelaw, former director of the Roslin Institute, the animal sciences research center near Edinburgh where she was born (and now part of the University of Edinburgh). A year earlier, the team had shown that sheep could be cloned by transferring the nucleus of a cultured embryonic cell to an egg from which the nucleus had been removed.⁶. That feat generated about 150 media requests over a week. When Dolly was announced, the institute was overwhelmed by a level of interest many times greater for over a month. “It was absolutely crazy,” Whitelaw recalls. “We weren’t prepared for that.”

The reaction to Dolly propelled genetics and reproductive biology into public attention at a time when interactions between scientists and the media were less common than they are today, Whitelaw says. Now, ethicists, regulators and scientists are more united and increasingly thinking about what technologies might be next to emerge.

Ian Wilmut, embryologist who helped produce Dolly the sheep (1944-2023)

But there is still no reliable system to prepare for the social impact of those technologies, or to systematically assess how the public and other stakeholders might respond. Last month’s news that researchers are working on how to use a precise gene-editing technique to alter the DNA of human embryos highlights this. Some researchers say not enough has been done to prepare the public or evaluate the ethics of heritable gene editing.

Even in the absence of such systems, governments must develop sensible regulation of new reproductive technologies. An example to emulate could be the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which proactively develops policies on fertility treatments and human embryo research.

At the same time, given the rapid pace of development, more countries need to adopt a framework to systematically help the public evaluate and prepare for the potential outcomes of cutting-edge research in reproductive biology. Otherwise, confusion risks giving way to fear, and the uproar that followed Dolly’s birth will inevitably be repeated.