| American biotechnology firm ViaGen Inc. announced that it intends to create a business selling cloned horses in the coming years. Champions of yesteryear who took first prizes at the most prestigious races are subject to reincarnation. At the beginning of this year, the company has already managed to create two such clones. In February, a clone foal was born on an Oklahoma farm, the genetic code of which was taken from the famous champion of the 80s of the last century, the mare Royal Blue Boone. It is curious that the prize donor horse is still alive: 26-year-old Royal Blue Boon is living out her days in the neighborhood, but, naturally, has long been unable to produce offspring.
After another healthy clone was born on March 9 (this time using the Tap O Lena mare as a genetic sample), the company announced its Napoleonic plans. The company already has two completely healthy foals, two more prize clones should be born in the very near future, and by the end of the year, if everything goes well, the number of living genetic copies of aged champions will reach seven. The company is going to reach the level of hundreds of clones per year, if, of course, in the near future horse breeders will be able to provide such a rush demand for these “products.”
Scientists first succeeded in cloning a horse back in 2003. It was a joint French-Italian project between Prometea and Cryozootech. The birth of the second horse clone was announced last year. Now the American company intends to put the process on stream. ViaGen received from its partner Encore Genetics a genetic bank that contains tissue samples from 75 champion horses that won famous races in the past.
However, despite the almost conveyor-scale scale of these bioexperiments, cloning still remains a very expensive procedure. For example, raising a clone of a cow costs a tidy sum of $90,000, notes Agence France-Presse, while the cost of giving birth to a calf the traditional way - with the help of a bull - even in the United States does not exceed several thousand.
Cloning champion horses requires even greater investments: ViaGen estimates the amount to be $150,000. However, in this case, these sums may well pay off: the genetic donor, Royal Blue Boon, was one of the most successful racehorses in the world in her youth. Her owners earned more than $380 thousand in prize money from her performances alone. If clones of racing champions perform equally well on racetracks, then this market will certainly flourish. After all, it is much easier to buy a young genetic duplicate of an aged prize horse than to breed a breed without a guarantee of successful results. True, so far no one can guarantee that cloned copies will be able to repeat the sporting feats of the originals. Mikhail MANSKOY
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