When World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus joined the tributes to Dolly Parton following her death this week, he remembered the country music star in terms rarely applied to an entertainer.
“Today is a sad day as we mourn an exceptional artist, a true champion of kindness, and ambassador of science and public health,” Tedros wrote.
Scientists were making much the same connection.
Nature devoted an article to Parton’s scientific legacy, recounting her support for medical research, vaccination, public health and literacy. Researchers remembered a celebrity whose relationship with science extended beyond lending her name to a cause.
“Few celebrities use their influence to support science so meaningfully,” Gaurav Kansagara, a cell biologist at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, wrote on Bluesky.
Parton’s most prominent contribution came during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March 2020, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, establishing the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund. The money supported coronavirus research, including early work connected with the experimental mRNA vaccine eventually produced by Moderna.
The fund was acknowledged in the first published report of the vaccine’s Phase I trial in the New England Journal of Medicine. At least 37 research papers have credited the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund with support, according to Nature.
Parton herself was careful not to exaggerate her contribution, later saying she received more credit than she deserved and describing her role as trying to put her money where her heart was. But she did something else once the vaccine became available.
In March 2021, Parton received the Moderna vaccine publicly at Vanderbilt and encouraged others to follow her example.
“I’m old enough to get it, and I’m smart enough to get it,” she said, before adapting the chorus of “Jolene” to urge people to get vaccinated.
William Schaffner, a preventive-medicine researcher at Vanderbilt, told Nature that Parton’s public vaccination provided a “shot of hope” at a difficult moment in the pandemic.
“Dolly Parton created a connection between public health and the average person,” he said.
COVID-19 was not the first time Parton had used her prominence in support of public health. In 1994, she contributed music to an album raising money to fight HIV/AIDS and participated in an AIDS-awareness campaign aimed in part at rural communities, where the disease was often perceived as an urban problem.
Her support extended further. Parton contributed to pediatric cancer and infectious-disease research and helped finance health care in her native Tennessee.
Her Imagination Library, established in 1995 after being inspired by her father’s inability to read, grew into an international literacy program that has distributed hundreds of millions of books to young children.
And her name became attached to science in an entirely different way in the 1990s, when researchers at Scotland’s Roslin Institute named Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in her honor.
Parton had no formal scientific authority. She represented no research institution, government or international organization.
What she possessed was something different: an ability to carry messages about vaccination, health, education and research to audiences far beyond the institutions producing the science.
That helps explain the language chosen by the head of the world’s leading public-health organization after her death: Tedros remembered her as an ambassador.