Animal 4: Cloned Goats and Sheep (It's a Tie)
For most people, it's probably more exciting to imagine clones of Fido running around the house than livestock clones bumbling around the farm. But to scientists and breeders, cloned goats and sheep are simply captivating and hold a lot of promise.
Sheep, for instance, can be genetically engineered to produce drugs that are useful in treating human diseases. One example is Polly, a cloned lamb designed to produce milk containing a protein that's deficient in hemophiliacs. Theoretically, sheep like Polly could be mass-produced to churn out medicinal drugs [source: Pecorino].
Ode to Dolly Dolly captured our hearts and minds with her monumental birth in 1996.
It could be said that this endearing sheep kicked off the mass interest
in cloning. Dolly lived out her years at the Roslin Institute in
Scotland and was the mother of six lambs born the old-fashioned way.
Sadly, Dolly was euthanized on Valentine's Day 2003 due to crippling
arthritis and lung cancer. She was only 6 years old. |
Fuzzy sheep are yet another benefit of cloning. Breeders have manually tinkered with their herds for years to get extra-woolly critters, and cloning enables them to easily perpetuate the genetics of those individuals that provide them with the most wool, thus creating a more bountiful product.
Likewise, some goats are cloned to produce herds that yield higher quality milk and meat products. Goat cloning got an additional boost by being one of the three species OK'd by the FDA in January 2008 for human consumption. There's no question breeders will take advantage of that decision to maximize the desirable traits of their Billys.
