Notebook

Image provided by Genzyme Transgenics Corporation

CLONING GOATS In contrast to cloning's popular image as a brave new way to mass-produce monsters, biologists have described cloning as a tool to ease other biotechnologies. Researchers from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Genzyme Transgenic Corp. in Framingham, Mass., and Tufts University School of Medicine in North Grafton, Mass., have shown how cloning can dramatically increase the efficiency of creating goats that secrete valuable biopharmaceuticals in their milk (A. Baguisi et al., "Production of goats by somatic cell nuclear transfer," Nature Biotechnology, 17:456-61, May 1999). Traditional transgenics microinjects a gene of interest into a just-fertilized egg--an effort more often miss than hit. Transfer of an already-transgenic nucleus would ensure that the offspring are female and transgenic. So following in the hoofsteps of Dolly the sheep and cloned cattle George and Charlie, the researchers transferred nuclei from cultured fetal fibroblasts into...