Cloning Noah's Ark; November 2000; Scientific American Magazine; by Robert P. Lanza, Betsy L. Dresser, Philip Damiani; 6 Page(s)

In late November a humble Iowa cow is slated to give birth to the world's first cloned endangered species, a baby bull to be named Noah. Noah is a gaur: a member of a species of large oxlike animals that are now rare in their homelands of India, Indochina and southeast Asia. These one-ton bovines have been hunted for sport for generations. More recently the gaur's habitats of forests, bamboo jungles and grasslands have dwindled to the point that only roughly 36,000 are thought to remain in the wild. The World Conservation Union-IUCN Red Data Book lists the gaur as endangered, and trade in live gaur or gaur products-whether horns, hides or hooves-is banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

But if all goes as predicted, in a few weeks a spindly-legged little Noah will trot in a new day in the conservation of his kind as well as in the preservation of many other endangered species. Perhaps most important, he will be living, mooing proof that one animal can carry and give birth to the exact genetic duplicate, or clone, of an animal of a different species. And Noah will be just the first creature up the ramp of the ark of endangered species that we and other scientists are currently attempting to clone: plans are under way to clone the African bongo antelope, the Sumatran tiger and that favorite of zoo lovers, the reluctant-to-reproduce giant panda. Cloning could also reincarnate some species that are already extinct-most immediately, perhaps, the bucardo mountain goat of Spain. The last bucardo-a female-died of a smashed skull when a tree fell on it early this year, but Spanish scientists have preserved some of its cells.