Sir

Your Special Report “Credit where credit's due” (Nature 440, 591–592; 2006) is critical of the extent of Ian Wilmut's claims to credit for Dolly the cloned sheep, as well as of authorship issues connected with the publication of her creation (Nature 385, 810–813; 1997).

Wilmut has modestly stated that his role in the research was mainly a supervisory one, and that others, principally Keith Campbell, deserved more of the intellectual credit. These comments, together with those made by a disaffected previous member of Wilmut's group, were seized upon irresponsibly by Nature

As someone intimately involved at all stages of the Dolly project, I am confident that authorship was properly assigned and that due credit has been given.

Dolly came into existence as a result of Wilmut's efforts to attract funding for nuclear-transfer research and his recruitment of excellent staff to pioneer innovative techniques. These amply justify his public standing as the person most clearly associated with Dolly, an outcome that has unfortunately been confused with apportionment of credit.

Dolly resulted from the combined efforts of scientists, veterinary surgeons, farm managers and farmhands, most of whom were not listed as authors.

To qualify as an author, one should have made key intellectual and/or novel technical contributions — inclusion of all, irrespective of the nature and extent of their contribution, can devalue the currency of those who are chiefly responsible for a project's success.

All the individuals listed on the Dolly paper, including Wilmut, met established criteria for authorship. The technical breakthrough that made Dolly possible was published by Wilmut and his team in 1996 (Nature 380, 64–66; 1996), one year before the Dolly paper. But the content of scientific papers that chronicle major discoveries is not always aligned with the impact those papers make and, unsurprisingly, of the two, the Dolly publication took the lion's share of public attention.

Authorship is an important issue for the scientific community and for scientific journals. Important steps are being taken to ensure that authorship is properly credited, as you mentioned in your Special Report.

But authorship issues are not limited to papers about cloning and stem cells. Such a focus could, in the present climate, provide further ammunition to those wishing to smear the integrity of all involved in this important area of scientific research.