Dolly

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If you are of a certain age, you remember well the stories from the late 1990s about Dolly the Sheep. Cloned from an adult sheep's cells, she was a celebrity around the world and launched a thousand imminent-doom headlines (even if the stories themselves were more even-handed). 

In case you've forgotten, here is a CNN report from the time:

Now, if you are like me, you probably have a few fuzzy memories of Dolly baa-ing on TV and haven't thought much about her in the last twenty years. She died at age 6, euthanized due to a lung infection, and the world moved on.

Yesterday we visited the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, which has a large number of artifacts and exhibits from Scottish history--it's quite a good museum. We were about done (museums are 90-minute affairs for us, since the kids get tired) when I turned around and saw a stuffed sheep slowly spinning on a dais in a display case. There were lots of animal exhibits, but something about this sheep caught my eye, so I wandered over, and read the display description, and....DOLLY! She's there! Or at least some of her is. I'm not quite sure how much of the display is actually Dolly.


I mean, Probably the skin and wool is Dolly. Are the eyes? What about the, ahem, droppings? We had so many questions. The display told her story, the story of her birth and life, that is, but the story of her post-life has got to have a lot of interesting twists and turns as well. Did they do an autopsy? Was she frozen? How long after death did it take before she appeared at the museum?

We could probably hunt down some of those answers, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. For now, I'm glad to say that, finally, I saw Dolly.


Comments

  1. GrandmaSeptember 15, 2023 at 11:24 AM

    As I told one of the boys, Dolly's "creator" died last week. Interesting that it coincided, more or less, with your visit to Dolly.
    Tell Alex, please, that we need him here. We are drowning in apples. Biggest crop EVER! Taking to food bank, giving away to neighbors, making applesauce--and NOT making a dent in the harvest.

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