Dolly the sheep was born at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, after being cloned from an adult mammary-gland cell. She was the first mammal produced successfully through this technique. Her birth demonstrated that a specialised adult cell could be reprogrammed to create a complete organism.

Dolly revived literary questions about doubles, manufactured life and the limits of human intervention in nature. Writers connected cloning with older myths and works such as Frankenstein while imagining identity without conventional ancestry.