LONDON (Reuters) - Dolly the cloned sheep has been fleeced in the name of science, and the sweater carefully produced from her wool was put on display in London's Science Museum on Friday.
"Welcome to one of the most unusual exhibit openings of all time," museum assistant director John Durant said as photographers herded, not unlike sheep, around a young girl modelling the sweater.
The blue-and-white fashion creation had Dolly's likeness -- grazing on a field of green -- knitted on the front.
The model, 13-year-old Holly Wharton of Rickmansworth near London, designed the sweater herself as part of a national competition run by the Science Museum, a medical charity and a mortgage business.
"It's warm," was all Holly would say of the product taken from the first fleece of the world's most famous sheep.
Scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute made international headlines when they announced the arrival of Dolly, the first-ever successful cloning of an adult animal, in February 1997. She had been born in July 1996.
Dolly's cloning sparked fears that human cloning would not be far off. But her creators have defended cloning as medically important, saying Dolly is part of a programme of research that could produce treatments for many diseases, including cystic fibrosis.
Staff at Leeds University, who transformed Dolly's fleece into a sweater, said it was a "very scary" process.
"Usually we have a test garment," said Steve Melia, who programmed the machine that knitted the garment. "But there was no spare yarn to test."
They handled the wool reverentially but it still fell off the machine twice, he said.
The wool was a bit longer than most wool from Dolly's type of sheep -- a Finn Dorset -- but scientists put that down to the fact that Dolly was quite well cared for and not that she had been cloned, said Harry Griffin, assistant director at the Roslin Institute.
As for Dolly, she didn't seem to mind donating her locks.
Griffin said she was shorn last May and had already grown another fleece. "Dolly's fine," he said. "As you're probably aware, she's pregnant so we're keeping her visitors to a minimum."
He wouldn't say when her offspring is due.
The Science Museum is one of London's most popular attractions for children. While the exhibit offers no explanation of how animals normally reproduce, children are told of a "process involving two individuals."
Cloning, on the other hand, "involves the production of a new, genetically identical individual from a single animal."