Born two years before me, Â鶹´«Ă˝ has documented unprecedented change since 1956 – the moon landings, nuclear energy, the digital age. It was my privilege to greet such whirlwind change during my time on the newsdesk from 1986 to 2018, a period that had no shortage of big discoveries, especially on the medical and biotechnology beat. I noisily (and literally) banged out my earliest stories on a typewriter, in an age of journalism that depended on telephones, notebooks, shorthand, faxes and a lot of red ink. Now, journalists can rapidly check facts and find expert sources on the internet – a real perk, amid the industry’s new challenge from AI.
Whatever happens, I’m sure Â鶹´«Ă˝ will always be there reporting truthfully from the forefront of science and technology – just like I did during these four of my most-memorable stories from my time writing up the world’s biggest science news.
1997: Cloning bombshell
Gobsmacked! Udder madness! That’s how I and colleagues reacted after scanning Nature’s press release in early 1997 about the creation of Dolly, the first animal cloned from mature bodily tissue. This was biological heresy. It challenged the textbook rule that once cells have developed into a particular bodily tissue – in Dolly’s case, udder tissue – it is a one-way street and they can’t be rewound backwards to their origins in the embryo.
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But that is what the team under Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute in Scotland had done. They succeeded by implanting the udder cell in a sheep egg emptied of its original nucleus. Given an electric pulse, biochemical factors in the egg completely rewound the udder cell back to an embryo, which then became Dolly after implantation in a foster mother’s womb. We recognised immediately this was very big news, and prepared a multi-page news splash for the coming issue of Â鶹´«Ă˝.
The breakthrough prompted a media frenzy. Not surprisingly, the focus was on whether people could be cloned in the same way from their own tissue. Suddenly, we had dire predictions of dictators cloning their way to worldwide domination. More positively, some scientists speculated that the cloning method could potentially yield fresh, limitless tissue from patients themselves for transplant or grafts, avoiding risks of tissue rejection. But anti-abortion groups raised objections to any kind of human cloning, on the basis that it would require tinkering around with human eggs.
Moral panic over Dolly continued for a while – a UFO religion in Canada called the Raelians even claimed they had plans in place to clone a dead girl – but the fuss eventually fizzled out as the limitations of the technique emerged. Dolly herself was the only successful birth from 277 rewound udder cells, and a 2004 claim of the first cloned human embryos by Wu Suk Hwang turned out to be fraudulent.
After all the hype and hope, the Dolly technique simply failed to deliver the goods and, other than niche applications such as cloning pets and rare animals, it gradually faded from the limelight.
2000: Landmark human genome
The unveiling of the first draft of the human genome was a monumental landmark following a 10-year marathon sequencing effort. “The most wondrous map ever produced by mankind”, as US president Bill Clinton described it, was simultaneously announced by him at the White House and UK prime minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street, but I didn’t get to visit either place. Instead, I and dozens of other journalists watched the synchronised video conference from the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust – an exciting moment indeed, although I do wish we could have been at Number 10 instead.
The draft genome was originally scheduled for completion in 2005 but arrived five years early in part thanks to gene entrepreneur Craig Venter whose private company, Celera Genomics, developed a faster way to sequence DNA. His entry into the fray sparked a race with the multinational, publicly funded Human Genome Project that had been running since 1990, prompting the latter to accelerate its efforts for fear that the genome sequence would otherwise become privately owned. In the end, it was more-or-less declared a draw, with both versions of the draft published simultaneously, and the credit shared across both efforts. Although we quizzed him about it afterwards, it took nearly two years for Venter to admit that the draft genome he sequenced was largely his own.
It was all very exciting, but everyone knew it would take many years to unravel how our 3 billion base pairs of DNA actually function, and how this might help us tackle disease and chart our evolution. Some of the first surprises included the puzzlingly low number of genes we appeared to have (although we now know that this was an underestimate), and discoveries of seemingly simpler organisms like fish and ferns that have far bigger genomes than us. Although it took time to reap big benefits from the genome, in the 26 years since it was published it has gone on to provide huge insights into human diseases and how to treat them, from cancer to covid-19, as well helping to reveal our evolutionary history and what makes us human.
2005: World’s first face transplant
More than 20 years on, I can remember the name of the recipient of the first ever face transplant without having to look it up. Isabelle Dinoire suffered damage to her face when her dog tried to wake her after she had taken sleeping pills. A surgical team in France, led by Jean-Michel Dubernard, said that a transplant was the only way her lips and chin could be restored and rewired into her nervous system, a procedure that would also restore the muscular function she needed to speak and eat.
It was a privilege to report on this astonishing breakthrough. Think about it! You’re taking a face from someone who has died and putting it on someone who has never looked like that before. The recipient, their family and that of the donor all have to get their heads around that. And then there is the medical complexity of detaching a face from one person and then grafting it – skin, flesh, nerves, muscles – to someone else.
The transplant was considered a success, and a few months later, Dinoire shared that she was beginning to recover much of the function of her face.
The success of Dinoire’s operation prompted other teams to try, and reported that by then, 54 had been performed globally, mostly with some degree of success. Dinoire herself died of cancer in 2016 aged 49, but I’ll never forget her name or her bravery.
2013: A hugely expensive lab-grown burger
Like the other journalists in the room, I didn’t get a bite of the first lab-grown burger to be consumed in public at a press conference in London, but it was fun to watch. The burger had cost £250,000 and five years of research to get to that point, and was sampled by Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutrition scientist. She said its flavour was “intense”, but that the texture lacked the fattiness of real beef. At the time, fellow journalists harrumphed about not getting a bite, and were mostly dismissive that it was all theatre, no substance.
There was, however, huge interest in producing meat in giant fermenters – a way to cut the heavy environmental and ethical costs of producing meat. But 13 years on, I’m still waiting for my chance to take a bite of a lab-grown burger. While the field is still pushing forwards – there are where you can track down lab-grown chicken strips, for example – any progress has seemed glacial, and there are now many cheaper and easier-to-produce fake meat options made from plants like soya. I guess I’ll just have to keep waiting.
