Idaho Gem: Horse-Donkey Genetic Crosses Excite The Horse Racing World In History Today, May 4, 2004

Photo illustration of mules (Source: Commons Wikimedia)

JAKARTA - On May 4, 2004, the world's first cloned mule named Idaho Gem was born. The mule's birth caused quite a stir in the conservative and wealthy world of horse racing. The Idaho Gem is a clone of a horse and a donkey.

To quote The Guardian, the Idaho Gem is an identical genetic copy of a racing champion mule named Taz and an egg from a horse. It is known that mules are almost always sterile because donkeys have 62 chromosomes and horses have 64.

Meanwhile, the result of the cross, mule, has 63 chromosomes. The Idaho Gem is also the first clone born to a horse family.

The Idaho Gem's birth grew out of understanding horse fertility. Despite the success of in vitro fertilization in humans, cattle, and other species, only two foals have ever been born as a result of this technique.

Attempts to clone horses also failed. Scientists are fighting for cloned horses or donkeys that survive.

The horse cloning effort is widespread

Cloned cells have either failed to divide properly or the fetus is rejected. Gordon Woods and his team at the University of Idaho, who created the Idaho Gem, found that increasing the amount of calcium in the solution where eggs are stored increases the chance of surviving a certain amount of time.

Professor Woods says his team's success, reported in Science, paved the way for horse cloning. "We really thought it would be easier to clone a horse and that could have a big impact," he said.

If cloning horses was possible, then genetic copies of the great, long lost original breeds could be made. "There are great racehorses and people are risking their fortunes trying to breed them," said Mark Binner, a horse geneticist at the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket.

Cloning will remove the uncertainty of the genetic mixture, providing a perfect copy of the original race. If someone could bring a cloned horse into the race, there would definitely be money in it.

Horse racing world controversy

Even so, involving cloned horses in racing is not easy. According to John Maxse at the Jockey Club, the UK's governing body for horse racing, horses made by artificial insemination, a category that includes cloning, are prohibited from racing.

Likewise, every horse born to parents was created by the same method. Apart from traditional conservatism, this is also to protect a broad and lucrative industry that wants to keep horse breeding as is.

"If you allow this, you can have the potential to mass produce horses and that could paralyze entire industries around the world," Maxse said.

There are also health reasons why cloning horses would be bad business, he said. "You run the risk of greatly reducing the diversity of the gene pool, which weakens the race itself. This is not the healthiest way to produce animals."

Still, cloned horses will still be valuable, even if they're not allowed to race, said Twink Allen, director of the Horse Fertility Unit at Newmarket.

"Imagine if you had 10 cloned horses that you gave to 10 trainers. Any horse that wins the race shows who the best trainer is," said Professor Allen.

Cloning will allow scientists to separate how much horse performance is passed down to genetics and how much training and feeding is given. Cloning will also allow better studies of equine drugs such as vaccines and antibiotics to be produced.

Professor Allen, who happens to be Frankie Dettori's jockey father-in-law, has mixed feelings about the birth of the Idaho Gem. His group is racing to be the first to produce a clone of the horse family over the past 18 months.

"I have to say the key driving force until now has been scientific arrogance; we want to be first. I feel very disappointed," he said. "But they deserve great praise. I just envy them."

The Idaho Gem is the eighth clone by scientists. Earlier in 1996, there was Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep. The following year, Cumulina was born, the world's first mouse clone. After that there were a pair of Alpha and Beta bulls who were also born from the cloning process in Japan.

In 1999, the first monkey was born to researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Center in Beaverton, USA. Still in the US, in 2000, five cloned pigs were born. An Asian bull named Noah, became the largest animal born from a clone in 2001. Prior to the Idaho Gem, scientists at Texas A&M University gave birth to a cloned cat.

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