It seems everyone is mourning Dolly Parton.
She made her mark not only on music, but in acting philanthropy and yes, in science, too.
It started with Dolly the sheep, the first adult cloned mammal.
Dolly the sheep, born in 1996, was cloned from the cells of a sheep’s mammary gland. In an unusually tongue-in-cheek decision, her scientist creators decided to name her for the famously busty entertainer. As I recall, they were coy about the origin of the name at the time but later admitted it, although in several interviews, Ian Wilmut, who lead the cloning team at Scotland’s Roslin Institute, told me he could not remember whose idea it was to name the ewe after Dolly Parton. Wilmut died in 2023 and the sheep died in 2003.
The singer said once that she was flattered. She always had a sense of humor as men and women alike joked about her figure.
“You know, when the scientists cloned Dolly the sheep, they used the mammary glands. That’s what they call them … glands … the boobs,” she told the Guardian newspaper in 2024.
“They said: ‘Oh, we have this sheep, Dolly …’ Everybody always played up to these [points to her chest], so that’s why we had Dolly the sheep. I was sorry when she died, though I don’t want be cloned myself. I want to get on out of here when I can. We already get a lot of Dolly lookalikes, a lot of Dolly drag queens. I can just send them down to the store instead of me.”
Dolly Parton had a much more direct impact on humanity and on science during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when she made a $1 million donation to Vanderbilt University and later learned it had been used to help develop Moderna’s mRNA vaccine.
Then she went live on social media to get a Covid shot, wearing a special sparkly dress with cut-out shoulders and taunting the vaccine-cautious about being “chicken.”
In between wisecracks, she ad-libbed new lyrics to her song “Jolene,” singing “Vaccine” instead.
Dolly Parton@DollyParton
Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine. @VUMChealth
9:41 PM · Mar 2, 2021
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