THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 16, 1996 TAG: 9603160002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
That latest news from the animal husbandry front - about the breeding of sheep that are perfect copies of one original individual - doesn't greatly surprise.
Humankind has been fooling around with the physical makeup of various nonhuman creatures for a long time. This goes all the way back, for one example, to the remolding of the auroch (a long-horned wild bovine that showed up in quite a few Stone Age cave paintings) into domesticated providers of roasts and milk and ultimately into the Elsies and Bossies of our own time.
As techniques improved, the gene mixing and matching went on to produce such dramatic results as the striped ``zorse'' pictured and commented on in an Associated Press article early this year. I saw a copy in the Delta Democrat Times my daughter sent me from Mississippi. The lightly striped zorse, seen by its California owner as the horse of the future, was the offspring of a Grant's zebra (the father) and a quarter horse (the mother).
The zorse reminds of other meldings by venturesome scientists: The appearance of such double-traited animals as the ``cattalo'' (a merger of cattle and the American buffalo) and the tiglon (a feline admixture of tiger and lion).
None of this, however, seems to have been as scientifically tricky as the production of the sheep clones in recently announced experiments at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Hailed as the first cloning of animals larger than mice or rabbits, the procedure at the institute involved removal of cells from a sheep embryo, getting them to multiply, then introducing the duplicated cells into unfertilized eggs from other sheep, eggs from which the chromosomes, with their genes, had been removed.
Presto - new embryos with identical gene makeup, generating not only sheep clones but witty comments from reporters about the advantages of identical sheep for those who count the woolly critters to get to sleep, and spawning such headlines as that in U.S. News & World Report: ``It Had To Be Ewe - and Ewe and Ewe.''
Eventually, the breakthrough is supposed to make it possible to produce lots of offspring with some desirable (to humans) characteristic or other - say, warmer wool.
Maybe so. But what we have at this point is merely a way to breed a lot of sheep that are identical in every detail, what with all those replicated genes giving each of the engineered embryos precisely the same developmental blueprint.
However, you have to be thinking very hard about future stuff to make very much of what has happened so far. For having all the individuals of a group of animals of the same species conform to a pattern of sameness doesn't really boggle the mind.
In any flock I might encounter along some rural roadside, I can't tell one sheep from another - right now. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB