Sinogene Biotechnology from China Successfully Cloned World's First Arctic Wolf

JAKARTA – Last June, a gene technology company in Beijing succeeded in cloning the Arctic Wolf for the first time. The cloning involves taking donor cells from a wild female Arctic wolf and combining them with an embryo that grows inside a beagle, which shares a common ancestor with the ancient wolf, to ensure the process is successful.

The puppy, named Maya, was born in June but it was Sinogene Singogen Biotechnology who waited to announce her birth until she was 100 days old in the hope that her clone would be in good health, and it turned out to be true.

Arctic wolves are not as endangered as other races, but Singogen hopes to use this process to save other endangered species.

While this is a scientific breakthrough, animal cloning has drawn controversy as activists say the animals involved suffer from the operations needed to obtain donor cells and transfer embryos.

Another argument against this process that some say produces animals by cloning is whether the technique violates some moral prohibition, such as people 'playing with God' by producing embryos without using fertilization.

The other side of the argument believes that animal cloning is a way to save species on the verge of extinction. But whatever it is, Maya is considered a milestone for the application of cloning technology.

She was created through the same technique as Dolly the sheep, the first mammal, which was cloned in Scotland in 1996, called somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Dolly, however, was euthanized at the age of six when she was found to have a lung tumor.

As of now, Maya is said to be in good health and exhibiting traditional Arctic wolf cub behavior.

"We started a research collaboration with Harbin Polarland to clone the Arctic wolf in 2020," Sinogene Biotechnology general manager Mi Jidong told the Global Times. "After two years of painstaking efforts, the Arctic wolf was successfully cloned. This is the first case of its kind in the world. ."

The company started this search by building 137 new embryos from enucleated oocytes (the process of removing the nucleus from the cell), which are cells in the ovary, and somatic cells followed by the transfer of 85 embryos into the uterus of seven beagles - and one Maya birth.

The genetics company behind the project wants to research ways to conserve animals that are more risky than Maya's counterparts. However, there was still a long road ahead of them. "It's relatively easy to clone dogs and cats," Jidong said.

“We will continue to work in this area. In the next step, we might clone rare wild animals other than dogs or cats … and that will be more difficult,” he explained.

But some in the scientific community have raised concerns, particularly about the health of cloned animals and how cloning will affect biodiversity.

Maya, for her part, is doomed to spend the rest of her life in captivity due to a lack of socialization.

Animal cloning has been the Holy Grail for scientists since before Dolly, but now it's a way to bring back species that have disappeared from Earth.

In March, scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz announced that they had sequenced the entire genome of the dodo bird for the first time.

The three-foot-tall, flightless dodo disappeared in the 17th century, and only 100 years after it was discovered on the island of Mauritius.

That same month it was announced that researchers at the University of Melbourne were working to bring the Thylacine back to life by reinventing an extinct species in the hope of being reintroduced into the wild.

The laboratory will develop technology that could achieve the extinction of the Thylacine, commonly known as the Thylacine.

“Scientists have also sequenced the thylacine's genome, which has provided a blueprint for 'how to basically build a thylacine', said Andrew Pask, head of the Lakes Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab.

The embryo will then be transferred to the womb of a surrogate host, such as a dunnart or a Tasmanian devil.