Britain Cuts Off Funding for Sheep Cloners

Britain’s Agriculture Ministry is to stop funding the project that produced Dolly, the first cloned sheep, the Daily Telegraph reported today.

Ian Wilmut and colleagues at Scotland’s Roslin Institute and biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics caused a global uproar when they announced that they had cloned a sheep. It was the first time an adult animal had been successfully cloned.

But the paper said that ministry funding would be cut in half next month and withdrawn in April of next year.

The team that made the cloning breakthrough at the Roslin Institute learned of the funding news in a letter from the ministry on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the institute confirmed the funding story but would not comment further.

The Telegraph quoted a ministry spokeswoman as saying: “If they have researched what they were supposed to have researched, then that’s it. The funding will come to an end.”