French Scientist Tracks Closely
Idaho Progress on Equine Cloning

May 29, 2003

MOSCOW, Idaho – French scientist Eric Palmer sees an important future for cloning in Europe’s refined world of competitive horsemanship. The reason’s simple: most of the top champions in dressage, jumping, eventing, equitation and similar events are geldings, castrated males that are now genetic dead ends.

For Americans, the direct comparison would seem to be the remarkable gelding Funny Cide that has already collected wins at the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. He’s a favorite to complete the first Triple Crown bid in 25 years with a win at the Belmont Stakes on his home track next month.

For Funny Cide’s fans, however, it may be anything but vive le difference between the U.S. and France.

The Jockey Club, which regulates American thoroughbred racing, bans cloning or any other reproductive technology much more advanced than natural service, the stallion mounting the mare.

In Europe, athletic performance in competition is what counts. Equine champions can come from any breed.

Unlike the racing world, where a champion stallion’s progeny are tested by age 3 or 4 on the track and can then be retasked for breeding, Europe’s champion horses take a decade or more to develop. That undermines the ability to test the performance of a stallion’s offspring. That produces the irony that brings Europeans like Palmer to America in search of a successful method for cloning horses.

Palmer recently traveled from his home southwest of Paris to Moscow, Idaho, to visit scientists who are part of a University of Idaho-Utah State University team that last year reported the horse world’s best prospects for producing a cloned equine.

“ The first teams who have published anything in this area, one of them is the team of Moscow, Idaho. And the first pregnancy that has been presented comes from Moscow, Idaho, and I think you expect the birth in a short time,” he said in April, basing his visit on a report by Dirk Vanderwall in Colorado last summer.

The team includes Gordon Woods, the UI veterinarian and researcher who directs the Northwest Equine Reproduction Laboratory on Moscow campus; Ken White, the Utah State animal scientist who specializes in livestock cloning; and Vanderwall, a UI assistant professor of animal science. Idahoans have their own horse to ride in any debate about the potential for cloning throroughbreds. Buddy Gil, an Idaho-trained gelding, made a strong showing in this year’s Kentucky Derby, finishing sixth behind Funny Cide.

Palmer’s interest in cloning horses arose long before the run for the roses earlier this month. Long an academic researcher, Palmer shifted gears to commerce and formed a company, Cryozootech S.A. based in Sonchamp, France, to rescue the genetics of gelded champion horses.

“ So now we come into cloning, why is cloning an interesting business? It’s another way to solve the problem of some totally infertile animals. Among these infertile horses are all the geldings, all the horses that have been castrated. And some of them, after they have been castrated, you find they are very, very big champions. And their potential is being a stallion.”

Cloning offers a tool to turn back the clock to recreate the stallion that became a gelding that became a champion.

The performance of the cloned stallion in athletic events will be less important than his ability in the breeding shed to pass on his unique carbon-copy DNA to improve traditional breeding lines.

Palmer’s own stature in equine science is unique. In 1990, he produced the world’s first test-tube foal produced by in vitro fertilization – uniting egg and sperm outside the mare’s body to ensure fertilization. It is a last-ditch solution for infertile mares. His team produced another test tube foal, and no one has reported success with the technique since. Embryo transfer, in which horse embryos begin life naturally within valuable mares and are then moved to less valuable surrogate dams, has become routine. With embryo transfer, a valuable mare can produce many more offspring than she could otherwise.

And while artificial insemination and embryo transfer has sped advances in horse breeding, Palmer is excited about cloning’s impact.

“ If you can take one of these big champions that has been castrated but is at the top of the genetics, there is potential for improving genetics and a business potential,” he said.

“ I am working with people in quantitative genetics. They made some calculations according to the type of populations and in some of the disciplines like dressage, like endurance, and like eventing, 90 percent of the big champions are castrated horses.

“ In this situation you can improve genetic progress, accelerate genetic progress by 50 percent if you are able to make stallions of these big champions,” Palmer added.

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CONTACTS: Bill Loftus or Kathy Barnard, University Communications, (208) 885-6291, bloftus@uidaho.edu or kbarnard@uidaho.edu