Ms. Gina Kolata reports in The New York Times (Tuesday, July 7, 1998) that Japanese scientists have created two calves that are clones of an adult cow. If their claims are correct, the two calves born on Sunday would be the first clones of an adult mammal after Dolly, whose birth was announced last year in Scotland.
July 5, 1998
TOKYO (AP) -- Two calves born Sunday are the first clones from cells from an adult cow, Japanese scientists said Sunday.
The so-far unnamed twins were born exactly two years after Dolly, the British sheep that made history by becoming the first clone of an adult animal. The two calves are the second adult-animal clones, and were produced by a similar technique, said Toyokazu Morita, an official of the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research Center.
"We have succeeded in producing calves from adult-animal clones, meaning that we can produce calves exactly similar to adult cows," Morita said. He said the new technique would be used to breed better cattle strains with higher-quality beef or greater milk capacity.
On February 16, scientists in the United States produced a clone calf -- a Holstein named Gene -- but Gene's genes originated in a cell from a 30-day-old fetus rather than an adult cell. Morita said calves had previously been cloned through the cultivation of ova with fertilized egg cells or cells from a cow fetus.
Jointly with a Kinki University animal husbandry research group, the center took somatic cells from an adult cow and placed them in unfertilized eggs whose own nuclei had been removed. Then two artificially cultivated embryos each were placed into the wombs of five cows last November, Morita said. All five cows became pregnant and one of them gave birth to the twins Sunday, although all were expected on August 13, Morita said. The center is 295 kilometers (184 miles) northwest of Tokyo.
J.T., Science News, Vol. 154, p. 152 (September 5, 1998)-- In a last-ditch attempt to save an endangered breed of cattle, scientists in New Zealand have cloned a cow named Lady. They plan someday to artificially inseminate her genetically identical calf, a two-week-old female named Elsie, with sperm now frozen in storage.
Until Elsie's birth, Lady was the last female survivor of the Enderby Island breed, which had been living in isolation on this icy island near New Zealand for more than a century. For several years, scientists tried to use in vitro fertilization, but Lady only gave birth to a single bull. Worried about the cow's advancing age - she's now seven years old - researchers decided to attempt to clone her using a technique similar to the one that created Dolly the sheep. Genetic tests have confirmed that Elsie is a clone of Lady.
"With [Elsie's birth], we have vastly improved the chances of saving this endangered breed, which had adapted to frigid sub-Antarctic conditions," says David N. Wells of the Ruakura Research Center in Hamilton, New Zealand, who led the cloning effort.