This proclamation trailed by a little more than two months the announcement, on May 30, 2003, of the cloning of the first mule (which joined sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, rabbits, mice, and cats in the list of animals already cloned). Gordon Woods of the University of Idaho (Moscow)—using funding from a mule-racing philanthropist—successfully cloned the mule, which was born on May 4 and named Idaho Gem (see Woods, et al., 2003).

But the mule’s claim to fame is nothing compared to that of the foal (named Prometea, after the Greek god Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man) that was born twenty-four days later on May 28. According to Cesare Galli and his research team at the Laboratorio di Technologie della Reproduzione in Cremona, Italy, what makes Prometea so special (aside from the fact that she is the first horse ever to be cloned) is the fact that the mare from which the somatic cells were taken in order to make the clone, also served as the surrogate mother for the cloned embryo. In other words, the mare gestated and gave birth to its twin. Or, as Galli put it: “Basically, she foaled herself ” (as quoted in Weiss, 2003).

But none of this came easily. One science writer lamented: “As has been the case with cloning in other species, the process was inefficient” (Weiss, 2003). That’s putting it mildly. In the case of Prometea, the Italian scientists removed a single somatic (skin) cell from a 6-year-old Haflinger mare, and fused its nucleus with an egg cell (retrieved from an ovary in a horse at an abattoir) whose own genetic material had been removed. [For a history of cloning from 1900 to the present, see our article at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2512; for a summary of the nuclear somatic cell cloning process, see our article at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2511.] That newly constituted cell grew in a laboratory Petri dish for eight days before being transferred to the mare (after she had experienced ovulation) for a standard 11-month gestation period.

But while the embryo from which Prometea grew was the only embryo to be carried to term successfully, it hardly was the only embryo involved in the cloning process. In fact, in their report in Nature, Galli, et al., reported that they had painstakingly created 841 embryos, of which all but about two dozen died during their first week in the laboratory environment. The scientists transferred 17 embryos to the wombs of surrogate mother horses, which ultimately resulted in four pregnancies. Two of those ended spontaneously within the first 30 days, and a third aborted after 187 days, all for unknown reasons. [It took over 277 embryos to successfully clone Dolly the sheep. Scientists are reporting success rates of only 1-2%, and of those animals that do live, many become abnormal adolescents and adults.] Such poor results are the norm, not the exception, as the chart below substantiates.

Table 1 — Figures represent results from the first research laboratory that was successful in cloning a particular mammal. [Numbers do not include those embryos from other labs, or the total number of eggs that never reached the blastocyst stage.]