DOLLY the Sheep scientist Professor Ian Wilmut could be stripped of a prestigious international award worth £70,000 as a result of the ongoing row over who really deserves credit for the work.
The Frankfurt-based foundation that last year awarded Wilmut Germany's top science prize is set to consider whether he should retain the honour after the professor admitted he was not solely responsible for the world's first cloned sheep.
Wilmut, testifying at an employment tribunal in Edinburgh, has admitted he neither developed the technology nor conducted the vital experiments, despite appearing as lead author on the paper about Dolly.
The scientist has been giving evidence at the tribunal, in which he is accused of the racial harassment and bullying of an Asian colleague.
Wilmut was awarded the 70,000 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for medical research for the pioneering cloning work.
A spokeswoman for the Frankfurt-based Paul Ehrlich Foundation said she expected the subject to be raised at a meeting of the foundation's oversight committee tomorrow, and that the possibility of Wilmut being stripped of the award could not be ruled out.
She said: "It is not a simple matter. It is most unlikely it would be decided quickly."
Asked whether there was any provision for a prize to be withdrawn, she replied: "It has never happened before that an award has been taken away. It is a very complicated issue. It is not about faking results or data, for example, and the question of who takes credit for what and how much credit they should take is a very complex one and there's no simple answer."
The Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize is regarded as the single most prestigious scientific award in Germany, and is substantially funded by the German government.
The honorary president of the foundation is the German head of state, President Horst Khler, and the chairman of the foundation council is leading industrialist Hilmar Kopper, chairman of the supervisory board of the German-US car giant DaimlerChrysler.
The award provoked controversy at the time because the research would have been illegal in Germany, with some critics even accusing their government of illegally funding cloning research by the back door.
Prim Singh, a leading molecular biologist, claims Wilmut tried to steal his ideas and continually bullied him while working at the Roslin Institute, in Midlothian.
Under questioning, Wilmut said that his colleague, Professor Keith Campbell, deserved "66%" of the credit for the work and that he had only taken a supervisory role.
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