Retrospective. Keith Campbell (1954-2012)

Keith Campbell, who died on 5 October at the age of 58 in the Derbyshire region of England, was instrumental in the birth of Dolly the sheep, in 1996 the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her birth overturned a long-standing belief that the mechanisms that regulate the formation of all of the different tissues of an adult are so complex and rigidly fixed that it would not be possible to change their fate. This unexpected result prompted later research by Shinya Yamanaka and James Thomson, who developed methods for the production of pluripotent cells directly from somatic cells, an advance that will have profound effects in research and, ultimately, in cell therapy.