7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

error checking (TCP) from issues related to domains and

destinations (IP).

Cerf ’s work on making the Internet a publicly accessible

medium continued after he left DARPA in 1982 to become

a vice president at MCI Communications Corporation

(after 1998, WorldCom, Inc.). While at MCI he led the

effort to develop and deploy MCI Mail, the first commercial

e-mail service to use the Internet. In 1986 Cerf became a

vice president at the Corporation for National Research

Initiatives, a not-for-profit corporation located in Reston,

Va., that Kahn, as president, had formed to develop network-

based information technologies for the public good. Cerf

also served as founding president of the Internet Society

from 1992 to 1995. In 1994 Cerf returned to WorldCom as

a senior vice president, and in 1998 he became the first

chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names

and Numbers, the group that oversees the Internet’s

growth and expansion.

In addition to his work on the Internet, Cerf served on

many government panels related to cyber-security and

the national information infrastructure. A fan of science

fiction, he was a technical consultant to one of author

Gene Roddenbury’s posthumous television projects,

Earth: Final Conflict. Among his many honours is the

National Academy of Engineering’s Charles Stark Draper

Prize (2001).

Ian Wilmut

(b. July 7, 1944, Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire, Eng.)

S

ir Ian Wilmut is an English developmental biologist who

was the first to use nuclear transfer of differentiated

adult cells to generate a mammalian clone, a Finn Dorset

sheep named Dolly, born in 1996.