Dolly to Lab Burger: 4 Unforgettable Biotech Moments — SkimNews
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- Ian Wilmut's team at Scotland's Roslin Institute cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997 from a mature udder cell — the only successful birth from 277 attempts, and a technique that "gradually faded from the limelight" beyond niche uses like cloning pets and rare animals.
- Craig Venter's Celera Genomics raced the publicly funded Human Genome Project, prompting a draft that was unveiled simultaneously by Bill Clinton at the White House and Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in 2000 — arriving five years ahead of its original 2005 target.
- Jean-Michel Dubernard's team in France performed the world's first face transplant on Isabelle Dinoire in 2005 after her dog attacked her face; a 2025 American College of Surgeons review counted 54 such transplants globally since, mostly with some degree of success.
- A lab-grown burger costing £250,000 and five years of research was first tasted publicly in London in 2013 by Austrian nutritionist Hanni Rützler, who praised its flavor but noted the texture lacked real-beef fattiness.
- Over 13 years on, lab-grown meat remains largely unavailable to consumers — progress the author calls "glacial" — though a few outlets now offer lab-grown chicken strips alongside cheaper plant-based alternatives.
Why it matters: The retrospective surfaces a pattern the original media frenzies missed: three of biotech's loudest breakthroughs — Dolly cloning, instant genome cures, and lab-grown meat — delivered far less than promised, while the face transplant, dismissed as freakish at the time, quietly scaled into a global practice of at least 54 procedures.
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