If the rumor that India will soon allow human cloning
is true , it will generarte billions of dollars of spare parts for
surgery to relieve humanity of much misery

NEW DELHI: India's ambitious plan to clone the cheetah, which vanished
from the subcontinent in 1962 due to largescale hunting, has run into
a dead end.

Iran has refused to send two cheetahs — a male and a female — to India
for research purposes. They have also refused to allow a team of
scientists from Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular
Biology (CCMB) to travel to Iran to collect sperm and tissue samples
from a cheetah in a zoo there.

The CCMB has been trying for over six years to get some tissues of the
animal from Iran for cloning.

CCMB director Lalji Singh and his team wanted to take the genes from
live cheetah cells and fuse it with empty leopard eggs.

Any resulting embryos would then be carried in leopard surrogates.
Iran is the only country where a close relative of the extinct Indian
cheetah is found.

Singh, who was the first scientist in India to use DNA fingerprinting
to solve criminal cases, said, "Iran and India were to jointly work on
the conservation of cheetahs in Iran and cloning of cheetahs in India.

A team comprising members from the ministry of environment and
forests, Zoo Authority of India, Wildlife Institute of India and the
CCMB were to leave for Iran. I had personally made this request to
Iranian president Mohammad Khatami when he visited CCMB."

"However, the Iranian government just recently informed us that they
will not loan India two cheetahs or allow us to travel to Iran for
sample collection," he said, adding, "The letter asked us to contact
Africa which is home to a lot more cheetahs."

CCMB, which has been working on this project for the past six years
was also ready with a special lab near Nehru Zoological Park.

The lab which costed Rs 12 crores and was to be launched in August had
facilities to develop test-tube baby methods, egg and sperm banks and
cloning technology to preserve endangered species.

Scientists in CCMB were also being trained in nucleus transfer, using
the same technique on rats, mice and rabbits.