The morally ground-shifting legacy of Ian Wilmut and Dolly the sheep

Ian Wilmut, the British scientist behind the first-ever cloning of a mammal, died Sept. 10, leaving behind a twofold legacy. One part is groundbreaking science. Creating Dolly required a combination of genome manipulation and reproductive tools that helped launch what is sometimes called “reprogenetics,” a basket of reproductive and genetic technologies that allow for greater control over human procreation and generated work that ranges from human-animal chimeras to the “de-extinction” of mammoths. By demonstrating that differentiated adult cells could be forced by the right chemical signals to become pluripotent stem cells, Wilmut’s work also provided the basis for Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel Prize-winning work.

Besides being groundbreaking science, Dolly was morally ground-shifting. Perhaps more than any other biotech advance, Dolly symbolized growing human power over nature. But the Dolly project was deeply troubling to most observers. Kept a close secret by the Roslin Institute and initially disclosed in a media leak in 1997, about eight months after her birth, Dolly caught everyone by surprise. At the same time, genetically modified crops were being rolled out quickly and quietly into the market. Collectively, there was a sense that the science was way ahead of the ethics. It looked like we were on the verge of being able to do whatever we wanted with living matter, and we all needed to talk about what we wanted.

The conversation that ensued was something of a mess. There was wild speculation that anyone with a good high school-level biology lab would soon be able to clone human beings to create less-than-human soldiers, organ donors, and identical replacements for deceased children — intriguing premises for dystopian movies or novels, but not remotely illustrative of how cloning could or would be used. Cloning became a tool to explore values, but cloning itself was not really understood.

So, great science, done in a way that fostered pretty bad public conversation about the science. A further part of Dolly’s legacy is the long-term reaction to such conversation. Scholars interested in the ethics of emerging technology began to take a step back — to think about how to think about the topic. In science and technology studies, for example, an entire literature arose around “responsible research and innovation,” which is a conceptual framework that has implications both for how scientists do science and for how society governs science. According to the principles of responsible research and innovation, science policy should be anticipatory and self-critical, actively seek other viewpoints, and respond to public values. “Public engagement” — the idea that the public should be informed about and should have opportunities to provide input about the development and use of new technologies — became critically important.

Following the news about Dolly, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, consisting of 18 scientists and scholars, delivered a report, at President Clinton’s request, that was mainly a thoughtful parsing of religious, ethical, and legal scholarship on the issues raised by cloning and that concluded with a call for “further public deliberation.” Fifteen years later, President Obama’s bioethics commission, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, would make public deliberation and education a central theme in its reports. In following years, reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on, for example, gene drives and human genome engineering have offered up entire chapters and sets of recommendations on public engagement. In 2022, the Dana Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance neuroscience, shifted its overall focus from funding science to funding discussion of the societal implications of the science.

Especially for a topic like cloning, public engagement is a challenge at best. The National Academies report on gene drives (on which I was a co-author) proposed that engagement occurs not with “the public,” which is too diffuse to engage, but with particular “publics” — that is, with slices or subgroups of the general public. For gene drives, the report proposed, publics could be sorted into three levels: the community where a proposed initial release of the modified organisms might occur, other stakeholders with a close connection to the project, and wider publics. Local communities are arguably the priority for a newly released gene drive-modified organism, since they bear the immediate risks and potential benefits. Local communities are also easier to engage: likelier to share values or interests, easier to meet with. But for cloning — as for human genome editing or some of the questions around neuroscience — it’s engagement with wider publics that’s most needed. The issues to be addressed are issues for everyone.

And engaging wider publics on science policy raises all sorts of hard questions. How should it be organized? What counts as success? How does it actually lead to policy? Many engagement practitioners rely on small events — elaborately choreographed workshops, basically — attended by a smallish group of people who represent the larger public. Some think that wide engagement must be carried out at the level of the wider society, through the mechanisms of democratic governance, the law, the media, and myriad other social institutions and systems. On the one hand, discrete events threaten to be too episodic to make a difference; on the other hand, the “deliberation” of huge social institutions and systems is maybe too diffuse, too chaotic, too unplanned.

Work in progress though it may be, public engagement has at least been recognized as a vital goal. Indeed, scientists themselves have increasingly come to endorse the need for it. A culture of transparency and engagement, exemplified by the efforts of Jennifer Doudna, the biochemist who helped develop CRISPR gene editing, to encourage public discussion of the implications of her work, is edging out the secrecy and technical focus that was more common in Wilmut’s day. “It is so typical for scientists to say they are not thinking about the implications of their work,” remarked microbiologist Lee Silver in 1997, discussing Dolly. At least among the scientists doing work connected to reprogenetics, that seems no longer to be true.

Gregory E. Kaebnick is a scholar at the Hastings Center and editor of the Hastings Center Report. His research interests include public deliberation about gene editing in the wild and the ethical and social issues of neuroscience and society.