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Pictorial — as well as physical — copies of Dolly the cloned sheep (right with ‘foster mother’) will in future need special permission following a decision by the Roslin Institute in Scotland to apply for trademark protection to control the use of her picture in advertising.

The decision was made after Zanussi, the electrical appliances manufacturer, used a picture of a sheep in an advertisement with the title: “The misappliance of science”.

But the advertisement may not have had the desired impact. Surprisingly, almost half of those responding to a UK-wide survey whose results were released this week said they had not heard of Dolly.

But, when given a series of six possible options, two-thirds of the survey respondents correctly answered that Dolly was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. Some 49 per cent of respondents thought that Dolly had been cloned to “advance human cloning”, a goal approved of by only 11 per cent of those questioned.

Although most respondents approved of biotechnology to develop medicines, only 17 per cent approved of genetically modified food. The survey was carried out by the public relations consultancy HCC-De Facto Group.