Prof Keith Campbell

PROFESSOR Keith Campbell, who has died aged 58, was an eminent biologist who played a critical role in the creation of the world's first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep.

Though Sir Ian Wilmut led the team at the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute (and earned the knighthood), it was arguably Prof Campbell who made the breakthrough. Indeed, Sir Ian later graciously admitted his close colleague deserved 66% of the credit for his contribution.

Keith Campbell was born and brought up in Birmingham. At school he excelled in the sciences and, when he left, became a medical technician in the Midlands.

He soon became bored with the undemanding job and left to study at the University of London where he graduated with a degree in microbiology. He then worked for a brief period in a laboratory in the Yemen before returning to the UK to join a team of microbiologists fighting an outbreak of Dutch Elm Disease in the Alfriston Valley in Sussex.

In the early 1980s he went to work at the cancer research centre, the Marie Curie Institute, a move which stimulated his interest in cellular growth. He was awarded a Marie Curie Research Scholarship which allowed him to attend the University of Sussex in Brighton as a postgraduate student. His work there earned him a DPhil.

Inspired by the controversial German embryologist Karl Illmensee, Prof Campbell became interested in research work into the cloning of mammals. In 1990 he joined the Roslin Institute as part of Ian Wilmut's research team.

It was Prof Campbell's research into cell cycles in the Edinburgh laboratory that opened the door to the cloning of mammals from differentiated cells. Through the research they had already carried out, the Roslin scientists knew that synchronising the cell cycles of the embryo and the egg cell would lead to a more successful cloning process.

Prof Campbell believed that following fertilisation, egg cells went into a state of suspended animation – the so-called Gap Zero – as they co-ordinated the DNA from the sperm with that of their own. In order to synchronise the embryo cells with the egg, Prof Campbell devised a way of starving the embryos until, like the egg cells, they too were Gap Zero.

Thus in 1995, by synchronising the DNA of both egg and embryo, the men successfully cloned two Welsh mountain sheep, Megan and Morag.

Two years later, after using much the same technique, the biologists stunned the scientific world with the announcement that they had created an animal, cloned from adult mammary cells. Dolly the sheep was born (though, actually, the Finnish Dorset ewe had been born in July, 1996, and her arrival had been kept secret for a year until the scientists were sure there were no complications and their results were fully prepared). Prof Campbell's Roslin colleague and keen country and western fan John Bracken named the sheep after Dolly Parton.

Barely a year later, and again using Prof Campbell's synchronising technique, the team followed Dolly's success with the creation of Polly, a lamb cloned from a genetically altered cell containing a human gene.

Dolly, meanwhile, went on to produce six lambs of her own, the oldest being Bonny who was born in 1998. Dolly herself died at the age of six from a viral infection.

Prof Campbell left the Roslin Institute in 1999 to take up the chair of animal development at Nottingham University's School of Biosciences where he continued to study embryo growth.

He continued to champion the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer (the so-called cloning technique) for the production of stem cell therapy and for research into human diseases. He also supported the use of cybrid embryo production to overcome the shortage of human eggs available for research.

Stem cells can be isolated from material derived from the embryo, the foetus and the adult body and he believed that all potential stem cell populations should be used in research which could advance developments in cell therapies.

He never lost interest in his early cloning work at Roslin and last year it was revealed he had created four little Dollys. The quadruplets are exact genetic copies of the illustrious original and he kept them more or less as pets in open land attached to Nottingham University.