Microbiologist who cloned sheep visits Belize
In their quest to cure diseases and explain the inexplicable, scientists around the world continue to push the boundaries of their knowledge through research and experiments. One such man is Keith Campbell, a microbiologist who along with a team of scientists shocked the world by successfully cloning a sheep. That famous lamb named Dolly was born in 1996 and lived to be six years old. Campbell is currently in Belize to attend a three-day conference on re-programming cell therapy in San Pedro. He stopped by our studios yesterday to explain the importance of his work.
Jose Sanchez, Reporting
You may not have heard of the Biologist Keith Campbell, but his work, the subject of controversy and legend, has obscured the boundaries of science and fiction. Campbell played a major role in the creation of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal.
Keith Campbell, Prof. of Animal Dev, University of Nottingham
“Dolly the sheep is a mammal that is so called cloned. What that means is she is made a copy of another existing animal. Our bodies are made of millions and millions of cells and each of the cells contain instructions which we inherited from our mother and father. And the question always was could these instructions be used again to create another individual. So what we did to Dolly is to take an egg which was unfertilized and removed the genetic material, the instructions that were in that egg in the form of DNA and replaced it with the genetic instruction or the DNA from one of cells within the body of the sheep. And hopefully, it is very inefficient, under the right conditions that animal will develop and will be a copy of the original animal from which the cell was taken in the first place.”
For the past four years, the microbiologist has been coming to Belize to meet with other scientists to discuss progress made in stem cell research. In addition to embryonic stem cells, there are stem cells in developing fetus, the womb and the human body. When stem cells are derived from later stages of development the potential for research becomes limited, hence the reason why embryonic stem cells have the most promise.
Keith Campbell
“Embryonic stem cell is a cell taken from a very early embryo which has the ability to form all of the cells in the body. So the possibility is in the future for certain diseases we may be able to replace cells within the body and cure diseases. Things like Parkinsons disease, and possibly spinal cord damage for people with various cancers, leukemia and things and we might be able to do some work, and diabetes, heart problems, for people who have had heart attacks, etcetera, maybe replace some of the heart muscles and rebuild the heart. So there are many, many diseases. So cell therapy is using growing cells as a means of fixing the body.”
Campbell’s specialty is creating stem cells for the other scientists who use them in their research. Stem cell research can improve livestock and crops and eventually harness cures for diseases.
Keith Campbell
“There are some very promising experiments being done in animals. But a lot of that now has to be translated into research and trials in human beings. And there are some diseases at the moment well some are just going on trial in the US. There’s a license to carry out a trial where they are trying to cure or they are adding stem cells to people with spinal cord damage. Christopher Reeve is a great supporter of this work, unfortunately he died. Michael Fox is supportive because of Parkinson’s. I think in the earlier experiments, one of the most promising areas in my opinion is people suffering from blindness may be treated with cells grown inside the eyes. The great thing about that is it’s actually outside the immune system, so the immune system doesn’t actually get to those cells; so you don’t have a problem with immune rejection. But I think in terms of the medicine, it isn’t huge. We’re sort of poised on the edge to take off and hopefully it will.”
“What we will be making for instance if you have a very expensive bull and that bull is deemed to have very good genetics, and you’re breeding into the population. If you make five of them you can breed it with a lot more care and disseminate those genes a lot faster. And so its now been accepted in America and the U.K. that eating cloned animal offspring is okay. So we actually see the use of this in the traditional breeding accelerating some of the breeding techniques. In the future one of the
Great aims and hopes is to make animals resistant to disease. Secondly, the farmer doesn’t have to spend a lot of money on drugs or antibiotics to treat those diseases. So there is another effect then those antibiotics are not left out there causing or allowing the creation of strains to bacteria or whatever that are resistant to the drugs. So there are a whole number of potential benefits.”
“The great thing is work on stem cells and work on cloning that gave Dolly has given us. Is that we’re now developing technologies which allow us to take cells from an adult and turn them back into stem cells. This will avoid the requirement for using human embryos to make stem cells therefore bypassing all the religious problems associated with that part of the technology.”
All these potential benefits started but will not end with a sheep named Dolly. Perhaps one day genetic research and the work of Campbell may help to improve the quality of our export crops. Reporting for News Five, Jose Sanchez.
Campbell obtained his bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of London and his doctoral degree from the University of Sussex. He leaves the country on Monday.
