Gary Poster, with essential assists from Galyn Norwood, Phiroon Phihakendr, Jose Quijada, Pavandeep Kalra. But it is not too early to give him the 1997 Brevity Award. His paper in Nature announcing his creation of Dolly runs fewer than three pages.
Concision is highly prized in science.
The premium on pith is enshrined in perhaps science's most important law, known as the law of parsimony, or Ockham's razor. It states, in essence, that when confronted with two or more explanations for a phenomenon, we assume that the more compact, less complicated, simpler one must be correct. Thus physics finds itself in a great funk today because it cannot neatly account for all the new particles it keeps discovering. It is saddled with a particle zoo whose inventory has the bulk and elegance of a Chinese menu. Because it is just too ugly.