Keith Campbell

Keith Henry Stockman Campbell (23 May 1954 – 5 October 2012) was a British biologist who was a member of the team at Roslin Institute that in 1996 first cloned a mammal, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly, from fully differentiated adult mammary cells. He was Professor of Animal Development at the University of Nottingham. In 2008, he received the Shaw Prize for Medicine and Life Sciences jointly with Ian Wilmut and Shinya Yamanaka for "their works on the cell differentiation in mammals". Education Campbell was born in Birmingham, England, to an English mother and Scottish father. He started his education in Perth, Scotland, but, when he was eight years old, his family returned to Birmingham, where he attended King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in microbiology from the Queen Elizabeth College, University of London (now part of King's College London). In 1983 Campbell was awarded the Marie Curie Research Scholarship, which led to postgraduate studies and later his PhD from the University of Sussex (Brighton, England, UK). Research and career Campbell's interest in cloning mammals was inspired by work done by Karl Illmensee and John Gurdon. Working at the Roslin Institute since 1991, Campbell became involved with the cloning efforts led by Ian Wilmut. In July 1995 Keith Campbell and Bill Ritchie succeeded in producing a pair of lambs, Megan and Morag from embryonic cells, which had differentiated in culture. Then, in 1996, a team led by Ian Wilmut with Keith Campbell as the main (66% of the credit) contributor used the same technique and shocked the world by successfully cloning a sheep from adult mammary cells. Dolly, a Finn Dorset sheep, named after the singer Dolly Parton, was born in 1996 and lived to be six years old (dying from a viral infection and not old age, as has been suggested). Campbell had a key role in the creation of Dolly, as he had the crucial idea of co-ordinating the stages of the "cell cycle" of the donor somatic cells and the recipient eggs and using diploid quiescent or "G0" arrested somatic cells as nuclear donors. In fact, in 2006 Ian Wilmut admitted that Keith Campbell deserved "66 per cent" of the credit for the work on Dolly the sheep.