Sir Ian Wilmut, OBE FRS FMedSci FRSE (born 7 July 1944) is an English embryologist and Chair of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the leader of the research group that in 1996 first cloned a mammal from an adult somatic cell, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly. He was appointed OBE in 1999 for services to embryo development and knighted in the 2008 New Year Honours. He together with Keith Campbell and Shinya Yamanaka jointly received the 2008 Shaw Prize for Medicine and Life Sciences "for their works on the cell differentiation in mammals."
Wilmut was born in Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire, England. Wilmut's father, Leonard Wilmut, was a mathematics teacher who suffered from diabetes for fifty years, which eventually caused him to become blind. He was a student of the former Boys' High School, in Scarborough, where his father taught. Wilmut's early desire was to embark on a naval career, but he was unable to do so due to his colour blindness. As a school boy, Wilmut worked as a farm hand on weekends, which inspired him to study Agriculture at the University of Nottingham.
In 1966, Wilmut spent 8 weeks working in the laboratory of Christopher Polge, who is credited with developing the technique of cryopreservation in 1949. The following year Wilmut joined Polge's laboratory to undertake a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Cambridge from which he graduated in 1971 with a thesis on semen cryopreservation. During this time he was a postgraduate student at Darwin College, Cambridge.

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