Gaur power

The humble Asian ox called the gaur has picked up where Dolly the sheep left off. In October, news consumers everywhere learned that this animal was about to be rescued from the brink of extinction through cloning, thanks to the work of a US biotech company, Advanced Cell Technology. ‘Extinction Could Be a Thing of the Past,’ heralded The Independent (London). “It is the first endangered species ever to be cloned, and the first cloned animal to gestate in the womb of another species,” reported the Washington Post, which broke the story about how the nucleus from a gaur’s skin cell had been transplanted into a cow oocyte and was, at that very moment, incubating in the uterus of a cow in Iowa named Bessie. The gaur was even named (Noah) before birth. After all, it was the only clone that survived that far, and it wouldn’t be much of a story if it turned out to be stillborn. The gaur was a great hook for the company’s grander plans. ACT scientists say they hope to use a similar technique to bring one species back from extinction — a Spanish mountain goat, the bucardo, whose lineage came to an end when the last member of the species was killed by a falling tree. Cells from that animal, a female, were frozen, and may now be resurrected through cloning. Getting a male to perpetuate this species is going to be trickier — ordinary goat chromosomes will probably be required. Even if that works, the genetic prospect of mating two clones together seems dim at best. And gaurs and goats are just the beginning of the dreams. ‘Breakthrough Might Help Clone Pandas,’ The New York Post announced when the news of the gaur broke. All the scientists need is access to some frozen panda cells (not currently forthcoming), eggs from wild North American bears (not too hard to come by) and surrogate bear mothers in captivity, should any of the nuclear transfer experiments into bear eggs actually work. This is getting just a bit ahead of the story, considering the state of the gaur research. The bovine-to-bovine procedure was hardly a snap: as Newsweek and other journals noted, out of 692 fused cells, 81 grew at least initially, 44 were implanted into surrogate mothers, and only one remained viable when the publicity tap was turned on.