Cloning
Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe, was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell. Dolly was formed by taking a cell from the udder of her 6-year old biological mother. Dolly's embryo was created by taking the cell and inserting it into a sheep ovum. It took 434 attempts before an embryo was successful. The embryo was then placed inside a female sheep that went through a normal pregnancy. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland by British scientists Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell and lived there from her birth in 1996 until her death in 2003 when she was six. She was born on 5 July 1996 but not announced to the world until 22 February 1997. Her stuffed remains were placed at Edinburgh's Royal Museum, part of the National Museums of Scotland.
Hello, Dolly! (musical)
The musical, directed and choreographed by Gower Champion and produced by David Merrick, opened on January 16, 1964, at the St. James Theatre and closed on December 27, 1970, after 2,844 performances. Carol Channing starred as Dolly, with a supporting cast that included David Burns as Horace, Charles Nelson Reilly as Cornelius, Eileen Brennan as Irene, Jerry Dodge as Barnaby, Sondra Lee as Minnie Fay, Alice Playten as Ermengarde, and Igors Gavon as Ambrose. Although facing competition from "Funny Girl" with Barbra Streisand, "Hello, Dolly!" swept the Tony Awards that year, winning awards in ten categories (out of eleven nominations) that tied the musical with the previous record keeper "South Pacific", record that remained unbroken for 37 years until "The Producers" won twelve Tonys in 2001.
After Channing left the show, Merrick employed prominent actresses to play Dolly, including Ginger Rogers, who started on August 9, 1965; Martha Raye, starting on February 27, 1967; Betty Grable, from June 12, 1967 to November 5, 1967; Pearl Bailey (in an all-black version) starting on November 12, 1967; Phyllis Diller, as of December 26, 1969; and Ethel Merman (after having turned down the lead at the show's inception) from March 28, 1970 to December 27, 1970.