Founded the company following many years practising embryology at the "Roslin Institute". Bill specialised in large animal embryology but also carried out work on small animals. He specialised in cloning and transgenic applications developing micromanipulation techniques and passing on these skills to visiting scientist's technicians and students.He started micromanipulation in the late 1980's and produced his first cloned animals in the early 90's cloning lambs using disaggregated 16 cell sheep embryos. He is best known as the embryologist who, with a team of experts, produced the first cloned lambs from cultured cells, Morag and Megan. The following year he and his colleagues produced Dolly the first cloned animal from an adult cell. Following this success they produced Poly etc. the first cloned animals from transgenic cells. Later he produced the first cloned animal with a gene knocked out. This proved the principal that disease genes could be deleted from animals. The team produced the first cloned piglet in Europe and helped develop zona pellucida free nuclear transfer in the mouse.
In recent years, Bill has concentrated on producing transgenic animals using disabled LentiVirus to insert genes into oocytes and zygotes. He has produced transgenic pigs, mice and sheep and has been involved in knocking down the PrP gene in sheep using LentiVirus. This principal could minimise the risk of devastating disease affecting the UK in the future.
