John Maynard Smith, Renowned Environmental Biologist and Geneticist, Shares His Views on the Creation of Dolly the Sheep with Web of Stories

London, United Kingdom, February 22, 2012 --(PR.com)-- When Dolly the Sheep was cloned from an adult somatic cell using the process of nuclear transfer, it was heralded as one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of recent years. John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) admits he was perplexed by the news of her creation: "I'm genuinely puzzled by Dolly the sheep...I read the paper in Nature and it convinced me that the phenomenon is a genuine one, and that's exciting, but it didn't offer any explanation of why it worked, because I would not have expected it to work, and most people in the trade would not."

Maynard Smith is world renowned for applying game theory to the study of natural selection. His ideas and published works, such as Evolution and the Theory of Games, were enormously influential and he was awarded numerous honours, including the 1999 Crafoord Prize (awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in fields not eligible for Nobel prizes) and the 2001 Kyoto Prize, Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement.

In order to preserve his own reflections on his influential career, Maynard Smith recorded, in fascinating detail, commentaries on a number of subjects, including his choice of career, the influence of others and how his fascination with topics not easily explained by Darwinian theories seemed to dictate his life’s work. To coincide with the anniversary of Charles Darwin's death on 12th February 1809, the resulting recording can be watched as a number of captivating short clips ranging in length between just seconds and several minutes with a fully searchable transcript. All Web of Stories videos are easy to share with friends and colleagues, and are free for embedding into personal blogs and websites.

Find out more: http://www.webofstories.com/people/john.maynard.smith/79

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