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Garima’s birth is a testimony to India’s low-cost scientific prowess. However, the million dollar question being, can we ever relish Garima’s milk?
Garima, apparently is India’s first surviving cloned living being. Created from the cells taken from the ovaries of butchered buffaloes in Delhi’s slaughter house, Garima’s is not just a symbol of India’s technological forwardness, but it brings to the fore country’s enviable capability of producing a low-cost cloned animal.
Yes, when pet cats and dogs in California are being cloned at $20,000 or more, India has come up with a cloned buffalo, which costs only a fraction of such sums.
In the recent past, Dolly the sheep, the world’s first large cloned animal, had caught the world attention. But Garima’s birth on June 6, 2009, was rather a muted affair, not just because cloning had been on the rise in the intervening period, but because even monkeys, horses, mules and camels was being cloned in various laboratories across the world .
Believe it or not. Dolly was not the first cloned species on this earth. A tadpole in 1952, and a crap in 1963, was the first cloned animals in the history of mankind.
The credit for Garima’s birth goes to scientists at the National Diary Research Institute (NDRI), located in Karnal, Haryana. “This is only the first step in our project” informs the lead scientist Dr Suresh K Singla. Now, we will be hopefully studying the calf for its whole life, Singla further adds. A cloned calf born in February, died within 24 hours of its birth.
Dolly’s story was ground-breaking; given the fact it translated textbook theory into an absolute reality. However, Garima’s story is no less brilliant. The water buffalo calf began its journey, not in a spotless laboratory, but in a unhygienic slaughter house in the suburbs of New Delhi. The egg that led to Garima’s birth was taken from the buffaloes butchered for their meat. The ovaries- which are usually discarded- were preserved by scientists and were sent to a research institute.
This has been the routine exercise followed in India for cloning purposes, which began in 1994. The eggs, once they are cleaned and separated make their way to the NDRI campus. The team of scientists here adopts techniques that are in harmony in with the Indian conditions.
First, the scientists here had tried in vain to make the best use of Dolly Method. And even several years were spent, trying to make a success of this method. But scientists could no longer endure the frustrating failures and finally gave up on this method, and adopted something called ‘hand-guided method’.
The main limitation of Dolly’s method was the high-cost involved. Eventually, the scientists at NDRI adopted the technique of Professor Gabor Vajta- a professor and senior scientist at Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences. Vajta has been trying out different techniques to cut down the cloning cost, and eventually came up with the hand-guided method.
Hand-guided cloning apparently requires just a micro-manipulator, a device used to work on microscopic organisms, a device available at NDRI. The biggest plus of the hand-guided method being that it has a higher success rate in large mammals as opposed to Dolly method. Dolly method, despite being an expensive, had a higher failure rate.
The buffalo, reportedly, is the fourth species to be cloned employing the hand-guided method, but certainly it is not that simple. The first cloned calf is said to have died of pneumonia.
Garima, belongs to the famous Murrah breed of buffaloes. According to scientists they give upto 2000 litres of milk in a single standard lactation period of 310 days. In India, 55% of the total milk production is from buffaloes.
The ultimate objective of all this research and experiments is to multiply the best bulls and females. In February when the first calf was born, the project was granted extra funding of Rs 7 crore, under the National Agricultural Innvoation project (NAIP). The sum was applied for when the development period of the calf began. The sum awarded to NDRI is record of sorts, because never before such a huge amount was assigned for a single agricultural research project in India.
Now,of course, the next step is to closely monitor Garima, whether she develops any sort of deformities later in life. Dolly, the sheep, failed to live her full life-span, because her cells aged prematurely, given the fact that her clone parent was an adult sheep. In case of Garima, the scientists seem to have taken care of the problem, because they have taken the cells from unborn foetus. As a result, Garima may go on to live its full life-span.
India currently is not bound by any animal cloning regulations. However, the million dollar question being, could we ever relish cloned animals milk? In the US, the Food and Drug Administration in January 2008 pronounced that ‘meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs and goats and off springs of cloned animals are safe. The ruling permits products from cloned animals to be sold in retail markets, sans any special labeling.
In India, however, cloned buffalo milk is still a distant reality, claim the scientists. The current focus is on the success rate of the ‘hand-guided method’, commercialization can subsequently follow.
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