Ian Wilmut Didn't Clone Dolly

Scandalous: Ian Wilmut did not clone Dolly the sheep, according to Ian Wilmut, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Prof Ian Wilmut told a tribunal hearing in Edinburgh that he had a supervisory, although "not trivial", role in the project. However, he did not develop the technology or carry out the experiments that led to the first clone of an adult animal from a single cell.

He added that he only appeared as the lead author on the paper that described the historic event because of a prior agreement with his colleague, Dr Keith Campbell.

Hmm, a prior agreement to take all the credit for research he did not perform, perhaps?

While it does sound, and perhaps is, scandalous, the head of a given lab often gets the lead author credit simply for being the head of the lab. That individual often does not participate much in the actual research. This became more controversial with the Hwang Woo-suk scandal, when Gerald Schatten, a University of Pittsburgh scientist who basically translated the paper into English but did not perform any of the actual research, was lead author on Hwang's lab's research.

Wilmut was being questioned by the tribunal on an issue unrelated to Dolly's origin -- an Asian colleague, Prim Singh, is accusing him of racial harassment and bullying because of his ethnic origin.