Pass It On

There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week about the cloned show jumper, Gemini, cloned from Champion Gem Twist, who died in 2006. Gemini is five months old and hasn't yet tried jumping over hurdles, but in a sense, he has broken through many of them.

The first obstacle Gemini has overcome is his very existence. In the last three years, veterinary scientists have cloned about 20 horses. The first horse was cloned by an Italian scientist in 2003 and took 17 embryos to create one foal. Since then, the success rate is about one 1 in 3.

The second hurdle was the price. Gemini's owners paid $150,000 to have cells from the frozen connective tissue of Gem Twist injected into an adult egg which grew in a petri dish before it was implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mare.

And the third barrier is the fact that defects in cloned animals appear more prominent than those in naturally conceived offspring. In other words, any small defect of Gem Twists may end up being a much larger defect in Gemini. All of that remains to be seen however, since it will be a while before we know if any or all of Gem Twists assets and/or defects were passed on to his clone.

Gem Twist's reason for existence actually has nothing to do with replicating his predecessor's illustrious career that included bearing three different riders to victories in Grand Prix championships, being named best horse in the 1990 World Equestrian Games and earning two silver medals in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. According to his owners, Gemini is destined to do something Gem Twist could not do--pass on his gene pool to another generation. Gemini will be a stud. Gem Twist was castrated early in life.

In this way, the clone becomes a link to a lost generation of genes. Interestingly enough, the article mentions the fact that had some of Barbaro's tissue been frozen, he could also have been cloned. I am not sure if the Jockey Club has a ruling on the eligibility of thoroughbreds born of a cloned sire, but it sure is an interesting puzzle to consider. My guess is that they would never permit it.

Technically, there is no guarantee that the cloned animal will be a reproduction of the original horse--only that its DNA will. How that DNA manifests itself is what is unknown.

There has been another horse cloned for similar breeding purposes: a barrel racer named Scamper. The clone was recreated with the specific purpose of passing on Scamper's (who also was castrated) genes.

Too early yet to tell if the mission was accomplished. The clone, named Clayton, is now 2 and apparently healthy although no progeny yet. "Clayton is a very confident horse," his owner said. "They sound alike and look alike and both horses have a sensitive spot behind their ears."