The interesting thing was at the same time, I was also involved in a bigger EU project to clone sheep and that was with Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell. I remember one of the goals was to derive embryonic stem cells from sheep and use those to clone sheep because we thought you needed embryonic stem cells to clone sheep. So, this was an EU grant. We were not very successful in getting embryonic stem cells, but as part of that project they took a number of controls. One of the controls was to take the nucleus of an 8-cell stage embryo, actually the whole blastomere, fuse it with an egg cell where the nucleus had been removed and transplant it to a sheep. So, these sheep became pregnant off the 8-cell stage embryo blastomere.

In part of this project, Ian and Keith thought they had to take what we call a negative control, which means that you would take a cell, you don't expect to be cloned, you just take another cell. And they took some kind of random epithelial cell they had in the freezer from a sheep and did the same experiment. And I remember to this day, we were at one of these EU meetings traveling in the train from Galway back to Dublin where we would catch the plane and Ian and Keith said, our negative control sheep is pregnant. I said, what? So, this was the telling me in secret that actually Dolly was expecting a baby lamb, the first cloned. No, it wasn't, it was Dolly's mother, so Dolly was on its way.

Well, it was within the pregnancy that led to Dolly's birth. So, all these moving pieces came together in many ways. So, this is how I knew Alan Trounson and Martin Pera and because I was interested in these human embryonic stem cells, they said, as soon as we have our paper published you may come to Australia and come and get them.

Dr. Christine Mummery is a professor of developmental biology at Leiden University and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center. Her work specializes in stem cell biology, cardiovascular development, and developmental biology.

In 1974, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics, electronics, and mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK and in 1978 received her PhD in biophysics from the University of London, UK for her research at King’s College London. She received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Society, UK from 1978 to 1980, and in 1981 continued her fellowship at the Hubrecht Institute working with carcinoma cells. In 1985, she was appointed to a tenured staff scientist working on developmental biology and differentiation.

In 2011, Dr. Mummery founded the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the Leiden University Medical Center. From 2009 to 20019, she was the head of the department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Twente from 2015 to 2023. She was president of the ISSCR from 2020 to 2021 and is the founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Mummery has received several awards for her work in developmental biology, including the 2014 Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives, the 2014 Hans Biomendaal Medal for innovative interdisciplinary research, being an elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, the 2021 Fondation Lefoulon Delalande-Institut de France prize for cardiovascular physiology, and the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2023.