It’s a Whole New World.
I’ve got to follow up on my recent post about the cloning of polo horse Califa. In that post I also mentioned the grand prix jumper – and gelding – Sapphire. The dapple grey Holsteiner earned the 2003 Pan Am Games individual gold medal in show jumping with rider Mark Watring (Puerto Rico) and had an illustrious grand prix career. At shows, Mark would often get breeding inquiries from people who’d seen him go and assumed he was a stallion. Mark always thought it was a shame that he couldn’t breed his superstar jumper, so when he was approached last year by US company ViaGen with the idea of cloning Sapphire, he agreed to give it a try. I wrote an article about Sapphire’s cloning last summer for California Riding Magazine, and posted it on my website (read the article here).
And then the magic of the Internet stepped in. Some months later, I got an email from a woman in Germany who had read my article after it popped up in her google search. The woman, Katherina Tansley, was 14 when her father bought her a newborn foal that she named Lindor. She hand raised Lindor until he was six, and then reluctantly sold him on to a family in South Germany. He then found his way to Mark via a few dealing barns, and in the process was renamed Sapphire. Katherina had been following his career since the Pan Am Games.
After she read about the cloning, Katherina asked me to help her get in touch with Mark. She wrote to me that “when I first read, that there will be a clone, I didn’t know what to think. Right now I think, he must be very loved and appreciated, that they want to clone him.”
Well, he is, and they did. The healthy clone was born in Texas about two weeks ago. I may have come off as a bit cynical in my previous post; a polo team of identical clones is still just so very sci-fi. But that was before I put the following two pictures side-by-side. It’s enough to melt any cynic’s heart.
The Original:
Here is Sapphire as a foal in Germany, circa 1992.
The Clone:
And here is the newborn clone in Texas, just a few weeks ago.
Will you just look at that? Tell me that these are not the most astounding pair of baby pictures you’ve ever laid eyes on. Cloning inevitably begs the question of nature vs. nurture, and there is no sure answer yet. But modern science is well on it’s way to solving that little mystery.
These are the archived posts of former Sidelines web editor Erin Gilmore's On the Line blog. This blog is no longer active.
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Very interesting. Are they planning on following the same career path as Saphire or just using the clone for breeding? It will be interesting to see how the foal developes if they chose to make him a showjumper and how he will compair to Saphire.
As a biologist this is very exciting news but it will open a Pandora’s box of issues. I would give anything to clone my gelding I owned for 20 years. I miss him so much. But as a herd of him would be so strange… Very Sci Fi as Erin says. I guess your breeding stock is your proprietary property but that means someday people my own the their animals but not their genes or breeding rights… I wonder what horses registration papers are going to start looking like if this takes off.
The photos really are amazing. Nice.
There is scientific proof about environment and external experiences affecting DNA. Newsweek did a story on small, somewhat poor, agricultural village (in Russia or Germany?) where scientists had access to 3 generations of family DNA. The study showed how famine and other external factors affected DNA and actually turned dormant genes on and others off.
Back to cloning: I see why people in sport want to clone the superstar athletic animals. I don’t particularly agree with it. Let the legends be what they are. Find and develop the new ones. We already have an excess of horses, too many from people’s whoopsies and let’s see what happens when we breed this one to that one.