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Hi All, These news items are indicative that cloning is a reality, like it or not.... New Scientist - Raising the dead http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns999957 Cloning extinct or endangered species is now possible, but is it useful? An extinct species could soon be brought back from the dead. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Massachusetts, plans to use normal goat eggs to clone a type of Spanish mountain goat that died out this year. The company has shown that this is feasible by cloning a rare wild ox called a guar using the eggs of domestic cows. Noah the guar, which is due to be born next month, will be the first animal ever created by putting the DNA of one species in the eggs of another. However, conservationists warn that the breakthrough should not be an excuse to relax existing methods of conservation. "As a last ditch effort for conservation, it might be useful," says Gordon Reid, director of Chester Zoo. "But it would be daft to imagine that cloning alone could save species," he says. The Spanish mountain goats will be cloned using tissue samples from the last surviving female, which was killed in January by a falling tree. But all the animals created this way will be female. Chromosomes from closely related species would be needed to create male goats. The lack of diversity among such clones could be another problem. "If you produce lots of animals that are identical, you get in-breeding," says Bill Holt of the Zoological Society of London. "They can't adapt to stresses." To create Noah the gaur, Robert Lanza and his colleagues at ACT employed the same technique used to create Dolly the cloned sheep. They took 692 skin cells called fibroblasts from a dead guar and fused them with cow eggs stripped of their nucleus. Of these, 81 developed into embryos, 44 of which were implanted in cow foster mothers. Eight foster mothers became pregnant, but five miscarried. Lanza and his colleagues removed three fetuses from two other mothers, and found that they were growing into what appeared to be healthy guars, they report in Cloning (vol 2, p79). So Noah is the only remaining fetus. "Right now, all indications via ultrasound are that there are no forseeable problems," says Philip Damiani of ACT. ************************** What next? Without safeguards, your imagination is the limit. The bar has been raised ........... murray [log in to unmask]