Scientist Profile : Keith Campbell

The Details: Profiles:
Keith Campbell

Hans Spemann
Walter Sutton
Oswald Avery
Francis Crick
James Watson
Paul Berg
Stanley Cohen
Herbert Boyer
Kary B. Mullis
Steen Willadsen
Ian Wilmut
Keith Campbell
Richard Seed

Web Link:
The Roslin Institute Online

English biologist and cell cycle expert who worked with Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute in Scotland on the development of the process to create the first clones from adult cells.

Campbell, who grew up in Birmingham, became a medical technician after completing high school. He became bored with the occupation and left to get a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of London. After a brief time at a lab in Yemen, he returned to school, working on his doctorate at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Inspired by past researchers such as John Gurdon and Karl Illmensee, Campbell was interested in cloning mammals. In 1990 he obtained a position at the Roslin Institute, working with Ian Wilmut on his cloning studies.

At the institute, it was his research on cell cycles that opened the way to the cloning of mammals from differentiated cells. Former research at the Roslin Institute indicated that synchronizing the cell cycles of the embryo and egg cell would lead to a more successful cloning process. Campbell believed that following fertilization, egg cells went into a state of suspended animation, the Gap Zero, or G0 state, as they coordinated the DNA acquired from sperm with their own. In order to synchronize the embryo cells with the egg, Campbell devised a process of starving the embryos until they too entered the G0 state. By synchronizing the state of the DNA of the transferred nucleus with that of the eggs DNA, Wilmut and Campbell successfully cloned two Welsh mountain sheep, named Megan and Morag, in 1995.

Using the same technique, Wilmut and Campbell shocked the scientific world with their 1997 announcement that they had cloned a Flynn Dorset lamb named Dolly from adult mammary cells.

In 1997, Wilmut and Campbell continued their success in the creation of Polly, a sheep cloned from a genetically altered cell containing a human gene.

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