The tremendous breakthrough in technique was achieved by Dr. Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Their goal was not the academic one of finding out about the control of genes but the practical one of duplicating sheep, as a step towards developing engineered animals for making drugs. It was an exercise in pure animal husbandry technology that would have been unlikely to receive a grant from bodies funding research in human health—even though its final application includes the production of pharmacologically useful drugs.

It is a comment on the increasingly narrow specialization of modern scientists that the Scottish feat came as a complete surprise to some of the leading researchers in the high-profile fields of molecular genetics and reproductive biology. Many of the latter had concluded from their research with small lab animals that cloning from the differentiated body cells of adult mammals was impossible. Meanwhile, the Edinburgh team went on developing their company-sponsored knowledge in a world largely unnoticed by other scientists. The team was seemingly unmindful of the ethical issues that could arise if their work were applied directly to humans.

Anxieties about cloning people featured prominently in news reports of the research. Often portrayed as a "taboo" and as a "dreaded" result of genetic engineering, the genetic duplication of a human individual was presented as self-evidently undesirable, even though it occurs naturally every day in the form of identical twins. The precise concerns were rarely articulated. Perhaps on closer examination most of them might turn out to be either unjustified or little more than a kind of human chauvinism ("it can't be done to humans because we're humans").