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Baby clone of endangered wild cattle euthanized
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- One of a pair of cloned bantengs, a rare species of Asian cattle, has been euthanized because it was abnormally large, its creators said on Wednesday. The banteng calf was born twice the normal size, a common cause of death in cloned animals, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technologies. "The second animal we euthanized yesterday," Lanza said in a telephone interview. "A banteng should only be 40 pounds (20 kg). The first calf weighed 40 pounds (20 kg) but the second was 80 pounds (36 kg), almost twice what is normal." Despite this, the larger calf looked healthy at first. "It was snuggling and then it took a nosedive. The vets at the zoo decided for humane reasons that it should be euthanized," he said. The two bantengs were cloned from the San Diego Zoo's "frozen zoo," a project launched before anyone knew whether cloning would work. Bantengs, enormous cattle that once thrived in the dense forests of Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia and elsewhere in southeast Asia, are now endangered. The zoo, working with cloning leader ACT, hoped to resurrect a male that died in 1980 without ever breeding. They want to use his genes to breathe new life into the inbred gene pool of captive bantengs, Lanza said. The experiment, a collaboration including ACT, the San Diego Zoo, Iowa State University and Trans Ova Genetics, worked in part because bantengs are closely related to domestic cattle, said Lanza. They cloned frozen cells from the long-dead banteng using cow eggs, and used a domestic cow as the surrogate mother. Cloning is fraught with problems and Lanza said the calf's abnormalities did not come as a surprise. "You don't ever know with cloned animals -- the first few days are crucial," Lanza said. The process of cloning can lead to an abnormal placenta -- the organ that nourishes a developing embryo and fetus. Many cloned animals have been born large, and this in turn can lead to fatal heart conditions and failures of other organs. "It not uncommon at all in cloning. It is called large calf syndrome," said Lanza. It is also one of the reasons that most cloning experts are reluctant to ever try cloning a human being. Wildlife groups have spoken out against the experiment, saying the best way to preserve a species is to save or resurrect its environment and allow breeding populations to re-establish. "Until the threats that caused a species to become endangered in the first place -- poaching, habitat loss, loss of prey base -- are addressed, creating animals in the lab doesn't solve the problem," said Jan Vertefeuille, a spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund. But Lanza said this was not the intention of the zoo, which wanted to preserve captive populations of bantengs. "The goal here wasn't to get a clone per se but to get the genes back into the population," he said. Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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