7 Ian Wilmut 7Education and Cryopreservation Research
Wilmut was raised in Coventry, a town in the historic
English county of Warwickshire, and he attended the
Agricultural College at the University of Nottingham. In
his undergraduate studies, Wilmut initially pursued his
lifelong interest in farming, particularly in raising animals
such as sheep. However, he soon turned his attention to
animal science and basic research. In 1966, his final year at
Nottingham, he received a scholarship to conduct research
for a summer under English biologist Ernest John
Christopher Polge in the Unit of Reproductive Physiology
and Biochemistry, then a division of the Agricultural
Research Council at the University of Cambridge. During
this time, Wilmut performed basic experiments on animal
embryos. Following his graduation from Nottingham in
1967, he returned to Cambridge, where he pursued a doc-
torate under the guidance of Polge, whose research was
focused on improving methods of embryo cryopreserva-
tion. In 1971 Wilmut was awarded a doctorate by Darwin
College, Cambridge; the title of his thesis was “Deep
Freeze Preservation of Boar Semen.” Wilmut remained
at Cambridge and conducted extensive research on the
cryopreservation of embryos. In 1973 he successfully
implanted into a surrogate cow a calf embryo that had
been cryopreserved. The embryo was carried to term, and
Wilmut named the first-ever “frozen calf ” Frostie.
Genetic Engineering and Cloning Research
Pharming
In 1973 Wilmut was appointed senior scientific officer at
the Animal Breeding Research Organisation (ABRO;