India to Clone Endangered Cheetah
© Environment News Service (ENS) 2000
October 24, 2000
By Devinder Sharma
DELHI, India, October 24, 2000 (ENS) - India is planning to clone the world's fastest running animal, the cheetah, with the goal of reintroducing the endangered cat into the wild.
With the establishment of a state of the art Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) in Hydrabad, India is all set to bring the cheetah back to the wild. Using the tools of modern biotechnology, scientists plan to produce the first cheetah clones within five years.
The cheetah cloning project, for which an outlay of Rs 50 million has already been made by the government of India, is a collaboration involving the Department of Biotechnology, Central Zoo Authority, the Nehru Zoological Park and the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department. One of the country’s leading corporate houses, Reliance Industries, has also expressed willingness to support the initiative.
Dr. Singh, who heads the 14 member crack team, plans to extend the program to lion, tiger, deer, non-human primates and birds. Already, LaCONES has begun work on a long term repository for genes, sperm, eggs and cell lines of endangered species. Preliminary work on the cloning project has also begun within the CCMB premises.
Cheetahs disappeared from the wild in India more than 50 years ago. In fact, the last sighting of the cheetah was recorded in 1948, when three young males were shot dead by a hunting party in the jungles of Bastar in Madhya Pradesh, central India.
At the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of cheetahs lived in Africa, western Asia, and India. But today, only scattered groups of cheetahs remain, chiefly in southern and eastern Africa and in the semiarid Sahel region south of the Sahara.
Estimates of the current African cheetah population range from a low of 5,000 to highs of 15,000 to 25,000. Another 1,000 cheetahs live in captivity around the world, about 300 of them in North America.
"It will be an ambitious project for the conservation of wildlife species. Already, American researchers have cloned the Indian Bison, and efforts are being made to clone the Chinese Panda. But nowhere have the scientists taken up this massive and certainly difficult task in a systematic way," says Dr. Lalji Singh, director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) at Hyderabad.
The cloning of the bison to which Dr. Singh refers is a project of Massachusetts scientists from Advanced Cell Technology, a private company. The birth of the cloned gaur is expected any day.
Aware that cloning is not an easy task, the Indian team hopes to draw and create cell lines from the genetic material taken out from live Asiatic cheetah cells. These cell lines would then be infused into the eggs of a leopard, whose hereditary material has already have been stripped - remove the nucleus from the egg and replace it with the nucleus from the skin cells of the cheetah. The transgenic embryo would then be inserted into the receptive womb of a leopard.
The rest would be left to nature with the hope that the transplanted embryo will naturally divide and grow in the surrogate mother's womb.
But the scientists must first overcome a serious problem - there are no Indian cheetahs. The Central Zoo Authority has been requested to procure an Asiatic breed from Iran. If that does not work out, the government is hopeful that Iran will permit the Indian scientists to collect the genetic material from its cheetahs.
Dr. Singh is not the one to give up easily, considering that he was the first Indian ever to use DNA fingerprinting to solve criminal cases. He was also the DNA expert called upon by the prosecuting agencies investigating into the assassination of the former Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology's foray into the world of animal cloning and wildlife conservation was purely accidental. Five years ago, the Ministry of Environment and Forests refused permission to American scientists who had visited Indian zoos to collect semen samples of animals to determine genetic diversity.
The semen samples were confiscated and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology was entrusted with the task of evaluating the extent of genetic variability existing in Indian lions and tigers.
Contrary to the conclusion by American scientists that there is no variability among the Asiatic lions in the American zoos, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology has found that there exists considerable genetic diversity among lions found in India.
The cloning of nearly extinct animals is now taking place in laboratories around the world. Advanced Cell Technology announced earlier this month that it has reached an agreement with the Spanish government to clone the extinct bucardo mountain goat.
To try to recover the endangered giant panda, in June 1999, Chinese scientists produced an embryo of a giant panda using cloning technology. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences introduced the cells of a dead female panda into the egg cells of a Japanese white rabbit.
Some environmentalists question the purpose of bringing back extinct animals when much of their habitat has been lost. Critics also say that reliance on cloning may lead to complacency about the destruction of habitats and other threats to endangered species.
Other critics say that cloning will simply place a few cheetahs in cages in zoos and the expensive process has little to do with restoring biodiversity. The money would be better spent on habitat conservation, they advise.