Dr. Lannett Edwards
UT Agricultural Experiment Station

Chuck Denney
UT Institute of Agriculture

Dr. Steve Oliver
UT Agricultural Experiment Station

Dr. Neal Schrick
UT Agricultural Experiment Station

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Audio Transcript:

Chuck Denney
Call it a scientific success story times ten. UT scientists have ten new cloned jersey cattle as part of an on-going project. These calves are believed to be the largest number of clones produced from the same cow. These animals are now several weeks old and some weigh over 200 pounds.
They’re all females and were developed from the same donor cow named UT 888

Dr. Lannett Edwards
“And the other thing that we’re continuing to do with the clones or any clones that we obtain in the future will be to very intensively monitor their growth and development throughout their life. That information alone is going to be incredibly important just to address this question “Are clones normal? Do they develop normally? Are there any potential complications with them?”

Chuck Denney
Dr. Lannett Edwards led a team of UT researchers who were the first in the country to clone a jersey cow. Millie was born in 2000 and Emma came along in 2001, but both clones failed to survive to maturity.Then in 2002 lessons learned from those first two experiments paid off with ten births.

“UT scientists aren’t just cloning cows for the sake of cloning. These animals represent valuable research about a disease that greatly impacts the dairy industry.”
The condition is called Mastitis. UT 888 is chronically infected

Dr. Steve Oliver
“What we have done over the past decade is try to understand how the organism can get inside the utter, multiply there and cause the disease referred to as mastitis, which is an inflammation of the mammary gland.”

It’s believed the clones will also be susceptible to the disease -- just like UT 888 -- but a genetic link is not a certainty.

Dr. Neal Schrick
“Is it a possibility there may be some genetic resistance that would make these animals more likely to never see Mastitis? That’s what we don’t know. These animals provide us that opportunity.”

Chuck Denney
UT scientists say if they’re able to study clones susceptible to Mastitis, then perhaps they can find ways to make animals resistant to the condition.

Dr. Steve Oliver
“So we have several clones on the ground now which affords us some unique opportunities to study these animals in much greater depth to unravel some of those mysteries associated with disease susceptibility and or resistance.”

Chuck Denney
Cloning may have lost some of its “gee whiz” impact on most people. But what’s going on here is amazingly advanced science, and ten is a pretty impressive number. However the real value comes when the public benefits from research, and cloning could mean a safer food product for all of us as these advances continue.

This is Chuck Denney reporting.