Dolly: The World’s Most Famous Sheep, Channel 4, Monday, three stars
“She was like the Naomi Campbell of the sheep world,” said one scientist involved in the creation of Dolly the sheep.
What Ms Campbell would make of that comparison is not known. But the quote and last night’s Channel 4 documentary in general illustrate how tricky it is to make science accessible. Go too far in one direction, and you are accused of dumbing down; go too far the other way, and the general audience switches off (especially at 10pm).
Katie Chapman’s film began at the populist end of the spectrum by wheeling out Jurassic Park, the Spice Girls and Paul Gascoigne to illustrate the year 1996, when the story began.
“The world was riding a science high,” said the narrator. “Boundaries were being pushed and new ideas tested. And in a sleepy village near Edinburgh, an excited scientific team were herding the paparazzi into their very own sheep pen.”
Paparazzi? Sleepy village? It was not a promising start. But if you could get past the first ten minutes and some later interludes, Chapman’s film was a pretty decent primer on all things Dolly, including her name (since she was created from mammary cells, they named her after the country music legend).
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We heard from key players at the world-beating Roslin Institute and PPL Therapeutics, the firm set up to commercialise the Institute’s work, and from journalists chasing the story.
Slowly, the layers of information built up, so that by the halfway point of an hour-long film, the average viewer had a good chance of understanding the basics of Dolly.
How long the facts will be retained is another matter. I seem to recall at the time Dolly being held up as the impossible made possible, and not fully understanding how or why she had changed the world.
Chapman’s film went some way to filling those gaps. But just when the fog started to lift, along came an anecdote to illustrate how the world went crazy for Dolly. In the fortnight after the story appeared, the institute fielded 2,000 calls, one of them from a US late-night talk show inquiring about Dolly’s availability.
People phoned to ask if their sick child could be helped. Others wanted a beloved dog cloned. As for the eejits who tried to kidnap Dolly, they were met with a barn full of lookalikes and gave up. All such lighter moments were ushered in with (wholly unnecessary) “comedy music”.
By the end, the story returned to its scientific roots and was the better for it. Whether by accident or design, I finally understood why Dolly deserved to be the world’s most famous sheep. Her creation opened the door to the rejuvenation of cells. This, in turn, is being used to treat dementia, restore sight, and perform other "turn back the clock" wonders.
“The legacy of Dolly,” said embryologist Karen Walker of PPL (she of the Naomi Campbell comparison), “is that there will always be hope.”
For that, Dolly, we salute you.
