Cloning may be used to reverse extinction
October 13, 2000
UK Telegraph
By Ben Fenton
GENETIC scientists in the United States claimed last week
that they could reverse the extinction of animals and
announced plans to recreate a lost species of wild goat.
The first step will be in about six weeks, when an ordinary
cow on a farm in Iowa will give birth to a gaur, an
almost-extinct breed of wild cow. The scientists said this
would herald an attempt to recreate, early in 2001, an extinct
species, the bucardo, a mountain goat from Spain.
Animals will be cloned to preserve the species by using
genetic material from the last known bucardo, which was
killed by a falling tree in the Ordesa national park in Aragon
last January. An emptied egg from another species will be
"re-programmed" and the recreated bucardo embryo
implanted in a surrogate mother.
The team used this procedure to create a gaur embryo and
implant it into an domestic cow called Bessie. The offspring,
called Noah, has been closely monitored throughout his
gestation and is reported to be healthy, according to a report
in the scientific journal Cloning. The team made more than
600 attempts to create gaur embryos. The healthiest were
selected for implanting into a surrogate mother.
However, there is some way yet to go and the research team
is aware that cloning generally has a low success rate. Even
just after birth, some clones have been known to perish.
Scientists at the Massachusetts firm Advanced Cell
Technology are planning an attempt to reverse the extinction
of the bucardo. An unspecified number of bucardos will be
cloned and, if the experiments are successful, returned to
their natural habitat in a mountainous region of Aragon. The
scheme is being run in co-operation with the Spanish
government.
Robert Lanza, an ACT spokesman, said: "One hundred
species are lost every day and these mass extinctions are
mostly our own doing. Now that we have the technology to
reverse that, I think we have the responsibility to try."
They are investigating the possibility of cloning other rare
animals, including the giant panda and the bongo, an African
antelope. Cloning pandas in the same way that the gaur has
apparently been recreated will be extremely difficult because
the closest relatives of the threatened Chinese animal are
rabbits and raccoons, both far too small to carry a panda
foetus to term.
The company says it hopes to use captive black bears, if it
can obtain panda cells. But there is no scientific evidence to
show that by implanting a cloned panda embryo into, for
instance, a bear, a panda can be born.
The technology has provoked ethical dilemmas and the
response to the announcement by ACT contained a mixture
of scepticism and outrage.
Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at San Diego Zoo, said: "Society
should reflect and consider carefully the potential of this
technology and its application and what it can accomplish and
what it cannot."
Kent Redford, of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New
York, said: "There will be a very hollow echo of a gaur in the
birth of that animal to a cow in Iowa.
"To say that is a gaur is to disrespect all gaurs in all places
where gaurs live . That animal will never live its life in true
gaurdom, to wander in the forests of India and frolic with
other gaurs and die and let teak trees grow out of it. "That's
the gaur I'm working to save."