2007-01-31 | permalink

Cloning Barbaro - On racehorse cloning

Will there ever be another horse like Barbaro? Maybe so, if it were up to cloning researcher Katrin Hinrichs. Theoretically, you could take a tissue sample from the now-dead racehorse, culture some cells and freeze them for future Barbaro clones, she said. "It just seems to make sense to do that when you have an animal that"s genetically valuable," the veterinarian who heads Texas A&M"s Equine Embryo Laboratory told me today. Not that you"d ever put a Barbaro clone in a race. First of all, the rules of thoroughbred racing bar horses produced through cloning, or even through artificial insemination. But there"s a more fundamental reason why clones don"t make good racers, Hinrichs said.

• MSNBC, USA: Cloning Barbaro
• The Washington Post, USA: New to the stable: Two champion clones
• MSNBC, USA: Horse cloning hits full stride
• MSNBC, USA: Horse cloning may give geldings options