Cloned Goat Would Revive Extinct Line

In the winter chill last January, a mountain goat named Celia was wandering through the rocky highlands of northern Spain when a tree fell and crushed her to death.

With that, another species vanished from the Earth. Celia was the last remaining bucardo, a goat known for thick fur and extravagant horns, which had dwindled because of hunting, habitat destruction and landslides in its home high in the Pyrenees.

But now, in a project that has sparked debate about how best to save endangered animals, U.S. and Spanish researchers are preparing to create a new Celia by cloning one of her cells. They say that, if successful, it will be the first revival of an extinct species.

The project may sound like another sequel to “Jurassic Park,” but many scientists believe that the tools that created Dolly, the famously cloned sheep, also can revive Celia and shore up the shrinking numbers of many endangered species. In fact, the tiny Massachusetts company that is working on the bucardo already has cloned an endangered animal: the gaur, a humpbacked relative of the cow from Southeast Asia.

Through cloning, the company created a gaur fetus and transferred it to an ordinary cow, which is expected to give birth on an Iowa farm any day. As the first member of an endangered species to be cloned, the new gaur will be named Noah for its symbolic role in leading the Earth’s animals to safety.

Noah’s birth, and the possible creation of a new Celia, could show cloning to be a powerful tool for preserving the Earth’s biological diversity. With hundreds and possibly thousands of species disappearing each year, cloning advocates hope that their work will convince zoos and wildlife managers to collect and freeze cells from endangered animals. Cloning not only could revive species that disappear, they say, but save those that mate poorly in captivity, such as the giant panda, a zoo favorite.

But the idea of restocking Noah’s ark with clones has drawn skepticism from several conservation groups, which fear that it could divert money and attention from what endangered animals need most: protected habitats.

“This [Celia project] is a Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together out of snips and bits, and I can’t see any conservation value to it,” said Karen Baragona of the World Wildlife Fund in Washington. “Animals aren’t endangered because their numbers are low. It’s not just a matter of making more. The problem is one of habitat loss and often of poaching. Unless you address those factors, then simply creating more of a species is not going to help.”

“We don’t have the necessary humility in science,” warned Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, an environmental group. “People think they have a Godlike capacity to insert genes and do cloning without asking questions about the ecosystem impacts and moral questions about what we are doing to species.”

Warnings and a Call for More Study

Blackwelder said more study is needed on whether cloning will create vibrant animals that can survive and mate properly and on whether cloned animals somehow might have traits that damage the environment. Others question the U.S.-Spanish plan to build a herd of bucardos from the genes of a single animal, warning that inbreeding has led to medical ailments in other rare animals, such as white tigers.

But scientists behind the project say it is both wondrous and useful.

“Only a few years ago, even scientists said this was impossible,” said Dr. Robert P. Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Worcester, which cloned the gaur and is collaborating with Spanish scientists on Celia. “We are here to show them it can work.”

Lanza said he and his Spanish collaborators want to make several copies of Celia and cross them with a closely related goat species to diversify the gene pool. He said that the new bucardos will fare better in the wild than the old herd, thanks to a falloff in poaching and better habitat protection by Spanish authorities.

The biological mechanisms behind cloning still are poorly understood. But in the four years since Dolly’s birth in Scotland, scientists have refined the technique and learned how to apply it to a growing number of animals. If Celia’s cells were frozen properly, “then the likelihood of success is pretty good,” said Randall S. Prather, a cloning expert at the University of Missouri at Columbia. “I think it will work.”

Cloning relies on the mysterious powers of a donor egg cell, which somehow knows how to grow from a single cell into a complex organism. The instructions for how to build the organism are contained in the DNA that lies within the egg cell.

In cloning, the trick is to remove DNA from the egg and replace it with DNA from an adult animal--from a sheep’s mammary cell, for example, which was used to create Dolly. When the process works, the egg treats the foreign DNA as if it were its own and it goes on to build whatever animal is called for in the new genetic material.

To make a bucardo, Lanza and his colleagues will place a skin cell from Celia inside an egg from a domesticated goat or from an ibex, a close cousin of the bucardo. They expect the egg to use Celia’s DNA to grow into a bucardo embryo, which they then will transfer to a surrogate mother--either a goat, an ibex or a goat-ibex hybrid.

Lanza acknowledged that cloning may leave the new animal with a small amount of DNA from the goat or ibex egg cell. Others have asked whether the bucardo will know how to act like a bucardo, given that it will have a mother from a different species.

“I think this will be a bucardo in any sense that you are concerned with,” Lanza said. “It will have all the traits that we call bucardo traits.”

The techniques used to clone the bucardo and gaur were developed for another purpose: to produce new drugs and medicines for people. Advanced Cell Technology, for example, wants to create cloned cows that produce a drug--human serum albumin--in their milk, which would help people with liver disease or severe burns. The company also is using cloning to create pigs with body parts suitable for transplantation into humans.

The bucardo--or capra pyrenaica pyrenaica--was populous in the Middle Ages, but it was severely pressured once guns became plentiful. By the turn of the century, big-game hunters would come from England and Germany to chase one of the rarest mammals in Europe.

Hunting and habitat pressures drove the bucardo into the most remote highlands of the Pyrenees, to “the worst terrain you can imagine. It lived in vertical cliffs,” said Alberto Fernandez-Arias, who will be on the Spanish cloning team. He earned his doctorate by studying cross-species fertilization among the goat and ibex,

The Spanish government made efforts to save the bucardo, but it does not survive well in captivity. Efforts to mate it with other goat species failed. The last male died in 1991, leaving only three females.

By about 1996, Celia was alone. Fernandez-Arias won permission to take cells from her in May 1999 in the hope that someone would figure out how to clone her someday.

Park rangers found Celia dead in January under a fallen tree. Fernandez-Arias speculated that an avalanche, or high winds caused by an avalanche, knocked over the tree.

Another Task to Create a Second Sex

Although cloning an extinct animal would mark a new turn for biology, even more fantastic possibilities could be ahead.

One involves gender. Because Celia’s cells could never produce a male bucardo, it will be impossible to use her to create a whole herd. But Lanza believes that he can replace one of her X chromosomes with a male Y chromosome from another species to create a male bucardo.

Dr. Kurt Benirschke, founding director of the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species at the San Diego Zoo, who supplied the gaur cells to Lanza, said that creating a male of the species would be a “formidable” challenge. “But technology advances so fast that it is not impossible to dream about,” he said.

Even more exotic is the prospect of reviving long-extinct animals, such as the woolly mammoth. Scientists have found one of the massive mammoths in the permafrost of Siberia. But the 20,000-year-old DNA in its cells is thought to be too damaged to produce a clone.

Still, Lanza speculates that science one day might overcome this hurdle. One possibility: Plugging any gaps in mammoth genes with DNA from the Asian elephant.

That fantasy, however, should not detract from the concrete benefits that cloning could bring to animal conservation today, according to Lanza and his supporters.

For example, said Benirschke, only a few thousand pygmy chimpanzees are left, including 130 in captivity. Their social structure demands that some males produce all the babies and others make none.

By cloning the males, scientists could pass a larger variety of genes to future generations, Benirschke said.

Mountain gorillas also might benefit, said Betsy L. Dresser, senior vice president for research at the Audubon Institute in New Orleans. The animals are being killed amid the Rwandan civil war in Africa, and only a few hundred remain.

“No matter how much money you pour in, you’re not going to stop the war and save the gorilla,” Dresser said. “There are no mountain gorillas in captivity anywhere. So unless somebody gets some genetic material from them, we’re going to lose that species.”