The Life Of Dolly Parton, The Queen Of Country Music

A Cloned Sheep Is Dolly’s Namesake

Maurice McDonald – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images

If Dolly’s numerous awards aren’t enough, she even has a sheep named in her honor! On July 5, 1997, scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh successfully created the first cloned mammal from an adult cell, rather than an embryo cell. The cloned sheep was named Dolly.

The team of scientists was led by Dr. Iam Wilmut, who said that “Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell and we couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.” To “make” Dolly, scientists took a single sheep cell from the udder of an ewe and implanted it in a surrogate mother, thus, Dolly is unrelated to the sheep that bore her but is an exact duplicate of the sheep whose cell was used.