Program: 01 | Artificial Evolution: Cloning Goes Mainstream

Peter de Kruijff: It's the first of October 2024. And around the world, news outlets are running utterly peculiar headlines about … sheep testicles.

Archive News Clips: An 81-year-old man from Montana is going to prison for cloning giant sheep … illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep … hunted in Central Asia … Schubarth and at least five other individuals conspired to create a larger hybrid species of sheep.

Peter de Kruijff: The man at the centre of these headlines is 81-year-old rancher Arthur Schubarth, who also goes by Jack.

And as you might have gathered, Jack had done something truly wild.

Peter de Kruijff (Studio Interview): Are you surprised someone could just clone an animal like that in the States? Like you could just send off some samples to somebody and do your own backyard cloning if you had the money?

Matt Brown: This was unique to me. This was a new one. We've done plenty of stories on illegal hunting and the lengths that people go to get animals. But this was the first time when it had taken a detour through a laboratory to create clones. And this was a whole new level of enthusiasm I'll say, for big sheep. It definitely is science fiction come to life.

Peter de Kruijff: Hi, I'm Peter de Kruijff. I'm an ABC environment reporter.

I came across this bizarre story of a criminal sheep cloning conspiracy. It got me thinking, if a farmer can run a scheme like that out of his backyard, what else is possible?

So, for Science Friction, this is Artificial Evolution on ABC Radio National, my new series on how gene technologies are reshaping the world around us.

I'm following the story from cloning Dolly the sheep right through to the present day, finding out how this science could influence the foods we eat, the animals around us, and even our own bodies.

Various Voices (Montage): Most people don't believe it's possible …they are, I think, essentially being treated like machines … we will bring the thylacine back … my hope at this stage is that we are going to very soon see several people who are surviving and doing well a year out from a pig kidney transplant … we're really at a precipice where we're starting to see the beginnings of a new field.

Matt Brown: So, Jack Schubarth has a ranch in central Montana in the town of Vaughn. It has fewer than a thousand people. It's an alternative livestock ranch. They buy and sell and breed mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other animals, mainly to sell to hunting preserves or game ranches where people can shoot trophy animals for a fee.

Peter de Kruijff: This is Matt Brown, a reporter with Associated Press in Montana. And last year, he reported on Jack's case.

Matt Brown: In 2012, he started to work toward creating giant sheep hybrids. The idea, he worked with other people, was to crossbreed different species to make bigger animals where people would pay higher amounts to shoot them at these game farms. So, what he did was he paid his son to go on a hunt in Kyrgyzstan where this species called Marco Polo sheep live. It's a protected species. They live in the mountains.

Peter de Kruijff: I mean, these are enormous animals, some growing to more than 130 kilograms. And because of that … and their gnarly-looking horns … they're prized by hunters.

Russell Bonduriansky: His son brought some pieces back in 2013 with a goal of helping create a genetically pure Marco Polo sheep. They smuggled it in. He began working with a private company to get the genetics so that they could start cloning these animals. So, they got some viable Marco Polo embryos. They used those to create a genetically pure Marco Polo sheep in 2017. The Schubarths named it Montana Mountain King. It's kind of presumptuous.

So, he started selling that Marco Polo semen. They started inseminating ewes with this semen, selling offspring to game farms, mostly in Texas. Clients would bring sheep species to Montana to be impregnated. Then Schubarth would sell the offspring. And all the while, there was falsification of documents going on to make it look like these were animals that were allowed to be moving in and out of the state. 

Peter de Kruijff: So, how is this possible? Was he able to just sort of ... he had his tissue samples and he could just send it to a lab somewhere in the states?

Russell Bonduriansky: Yeah, he worked with a private lab. I'm not sure of the legal controls they had at that facility. But yes, he worked with others to create these animals. Operated for a few years selling these. Sold animals to Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, a few other states. I don't remember them all. But it was a pretty big operation when it was going.

Peter de Kruijff: Oh, and in case you're wondering what happened to Jack, he faced a hefty penalty for his role in the cloning conspiracy.

Russell Bonduriansky: He pleaded guilty to wildlife trafficking and conspiracy to traffic wildlife. He faced up to five years in prison and $250,000 fine. His sentence was six months in prison, a $20,000 fine.

Schubarth is in his 80s now. And apparently this being arrested, going through the court process was just devastating to him. His family submitted letters talking about the shame and embarrassment that he's had over this. He had to get help from family members just to pay his lawyer. His lawyer at his sentencing described him as broken by his prosecution.

Peter de Kruijff: But how did we get to the point where an 81-year-old man from a rural US town could clone anything at all? Let alone running a cross-state cloning operation over the best part of a decade. To understand that, we've got to … you guessed it … we've got to go back in time.

Russell Bonduriansky: I actually would start in the late 19th century. There was a lot of interesting work at the time on how embryos develop. And there were a lot of strange experiments being done with little bits of embryos cut off and transferred to other embryos.

Peter de Kruijff: This is Professor Russell Bondriansky. He's an evolutionary ecologist at the University of New South Wales.

Russell Bonduriansky: Things done to sea urchin eggs and salamander eggs and frog eggs.

Peter de Kruijff: And these strange experiments of the 19th century laid the groundwork for what was to come.

Russell Bonduriansky: In the 1960s, British scientist John Gurdon was able to transfer nuclei from somatic cells of a frog, an African Clawed Frog, into eggs.

Peter de Kruijff: Alright, so a quick refresher here. The kind of cloning we're talking about is somatic cell cloning. Somatic cells are any old cell in an animal that isn't a reproductive one, like sperm or eggs. To make a clone, take a somatic cell from a frog or a sheep and remove the nucleus. That's the part of the cell with DNA inside, the control centre, if you will.

You then put that into an egg which has had its own nucleus removed. So you're basically copying over the genetics of the original animal into this empty egg. If you then stimulate that egg, it will turn into an embryo. That can be implanted into a surrogate mother. Mum gives birth and hey, you've got a clone. That's the basis of cloning technology, which is what Gurdon achieved with his frogs.

Russell Bonduriansky: Some of the eggs developed and produced adult frogs. And so this is the first instance of what we would consider genuine cloning.

Peter de Kruijff: Then, a couple of decades later, along came Dolly.

Archive: Scientists in Scotland have bred the first ever clone using a cell from an adult animal. The breakthrough has produced a clone from an adult sheep. The development is expected to expand...

Russell Bonduriansky: Well, Dolly was very significant because Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned. And she was cloned using a similar technique to the technique that John Gurdon had used with the frogs. There was a nucleus taken from, I believe, an udder cell and put into an egg, a sheep egg.

Actually, I say sheep egg, but there were many, many, many attempts. There were many eggs. And these were transplanted then into the uterus of an adult sheep. And a few of these implanted, and only one developed and was born successfully as a viable offspring. So this was really, really significant because it showed that mammals could also be cloned. It wasn't just a frog thing.

Peter de Kruijff: Dolly the sheep was born on the 5th of July, 1996. She was cloned by scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. And the announcement of her creation six months later sent shockwaves through the public and scientists worldwide.

Russell Bonduriansky: It was quite exciting. It opened interesting possibilities, somewhat maybe scary possibilities as well, because now it was clear that mammals could be cloned as well.

Peter de Kruijff: Dolly lived for six years at the Roslin Institute. She even bred with a Welsh mountain ram and had six lambs herself. Then, in 2003, she was euthanised because of a lung disease and arthritis. 

Archive: The news came through last week that the world's first cloned sheep, a ewe called Dolly, had passed away aged six and a half.

Peter de Kruijff: You can visit her taxidermied body on display at the National Museum of Scotland.

Not long after the birth of Dolly, there were a heap more mammalian clones. Mice, cows and goats were all successfully cloned using these techniques.

In 2001, the first cat was cloned by a scientist in Texas and named CC, or Copycat. She went on to become the first cloned pet to give birth to kittens, a litter of four. CC lived until she was 18 years old.

Dogs proved a little trickier. In 2005, the first dog clone, named Schuppy, was created in South Korea. He was an Afghan hound. 

Archive: The South Korean team, which successfully cloned human embryos last year, has announced the birth of the world's first cloned dog. The Afghan hound puppy is called Schnuppy, an acronym for Seoul National University Puppy. The scientists say the work may revolutionise treatment for human diseases such as diabetes, cancer and dementia.

Peter de Kruijff: In late 2017, the first cloned primates were born in China. Two crab-eating macaques called Zhongzhong and Huahua. In 2020, a rhesus monkey was cloned successfully. The team, again from China, named him Retro.

So while the landmark case of Dolly that proved cloning could be done in mammals does seem far away in time for many of us, the picture from the field is that cloning is still very much a work in progress, a developing technology.

Russell Bonduriansky: It started off as a kind of experimental technique and no one was quite sure where it would go. But at this stage, quite a few species of mammals have been cloned. So there's still a lot that we don't understand about how embryos develop and about the epigenome, all of that epigenetic machinery that allows our tissues to specialise for different functions but also allows embryos to develop the way they do. So it's an extremely complex problem.

But I think a lot of progress has been made in resolving various parts of that. And so even though success rates are still quite low in cloning, so many attempts are required to get a few viable embryos, and even the viable embryos often develop into offspring that die soon after birth. So there's still a great deal that we haven't solved yet. But I think a lot of progress has been made.

Peter de Kruijff: On ABC Radio National, you're listening to Science Friction with me, Peter de Kruijff.

It's clones like CC the cat and Schnuppy the dog that have paved the way for a new commercial cloning reality. And it's a market that's reportedly growing. One of the prominent companies in this space is Viagen in the United States. For $50,000 US dollars, you can clone your cat or a dog. A horse, meanwhile, is about $85,000. Their celebrity clientele includes one Barbra Streisand.

Archive: Two of Barbra's three pups are clones of her beloved Samantha. The third is a rescue. She admits her furry little family is a little spoiled, but she wouldn't have it any other way.

Russell Bonduriansky: These are obviously wealthy people that are able to pay for this kind of an approach, this kind of a technique, to a pet that they really, really loved, and they want to be able to keep it after it ages and dies. So Barbra Streisand, for example, had her dog cloned, and she had two copies, two clones made of her dog. And apparently these are quite viable, and she really liked them, but last I heard or last I read, these clones were not quite what she expected. They were not exactly like the original dog, which is in itself not surprising to me, because in a clone, you're only actually replicating the DNA sequence, but there's a lot more than the DNA sequence that goes into creating an entire animal, an entire organism.

Peter de Kruijff: More on that in a minute, because the market isn't just in pets. Commercial cloning is also happening in cattle and horses, including here in Australia. My producer James Bullen over in Sydney made a visit to one local company that clones horses, Catalina Equine. They're in the Hawkesbury region.

Karlene Hennig: So this is Rex 5. He was born July 3rd, out of a non-maiden mare, so she's had a foal before. This one's quite friendly. He was in a box for two weeks, so that's one of those nurture aspects of them. 

James Bullen: I've never really been around horses that much to be honest.

John Farren-Price: You just keep your hand flat so they don't... if you put your hand out like that, they'll just take your fingers. 

James Bullen: Yeah, right.

John Farren-Price: Well, not take them, but...

James Bullen: Give them a little nibble, yeah.

James Bullen: I'm looking at six clones of the same horse, all born a couple of months ago. They're chestnut in colour and they're pretty cute. They're destined to be polo horses, like most of the clones here. Clones can't be used in racing, but they can be used for more boutique horse sports. Things like polo and camp drafting.

James Bullen: And how does it feel to raise a cloned horse? Is it any different?

Karlene Hennig: It's really exciting. I love watching them learn and grow, and like the similarities and the differences between all of them. For example, we've got the first Rex. He was born when we didn't have too many foals on farms, so he was very spoiled. So he's extremely friendly and will come up to you in the paddock for a pet.

James Bullen: Karleen Hennig is a horse manager at Catalina.

Karlene Hennig: Whereas, say, Rex 3, for example, we had about 12 clones on property at that time, so he didn't get as much attention. So he's a little bit more standoffish. He's still very curious and wants to get to interact with people, but he's a bit more cautious. But he'll come around.

John Farren-Price: And then you'll start to see subtle differences with these guys. So it's the same with the tweed and twill. You'll notice that their base colour is the same. They broadly share the same level of muscle mass. To the untrained eye, they're identical, but then if you start to drill down on things like the blaze, so the colouring of their face, they're all unique. Which again is really cool, because I think it speaks to the fact that they're all... I think one of the public's great misconceptions is that they are just a photocopy of the original, and they're absolutely not. They all have subtle differences that make them unique. And that really shows through with these six Rex clones. They obviously kind of anchor back to the same DNA, but for a whole host of reasons, they're quite different, even at this young age.

James Bullen: There are 15 clones here. Catalina's cloned more than 80 horses since their first in 2020. John started this business because he wanted to save the genetics of a particular horse.

John Farren-Price: So we had a mare that was four years of age, I think she was at the time, who was really promising, really well bred. And unfortunately she died of colic. And it was obviously really disappointing and sad. She was a terrific mare and showed a lot of potential. 

And at the time, cloning wasn't available in Australia, but obviously I was quite familiar with all of the cloning that happens in polo overseas. So we looked overseas, looked at the technology, and kind of came to the realisation that it was certainly doable to clone a horse in Australia. It was acquiring equipment and bringing in some people from overseas as embryologists to perfect the technique here in Australia. It's not technology that's licensable, so you can't just take a licence of the technology from someone else. You really have to create the technology yourself, which obviously has significant hurdles.

But it was something we were keen to try to achieve. So that process took, I think it was two years, to build the technology and transfer the embryos and get a foal on the ground, which was Vicuna.

James Bullen: I mean, it's a huge undertaking. How did people around you react when you were like, I'm going to do this cloning?

John Farren-Price: There's a lot of naysayers and people that don't believe it's possible. For a lot of people, when they come on and see a clone, to a degree it's a surprise but also a little bit of disappointment, because a clone in a mob of other horses is still just a horse. There's four legs, a tail, a head, and they're just a horse, like every other horse.

James Bullen: John says there are two main groups of people who want a cloned horse. There are those who loved that horse in particular, they had good memories of it and so they wanted to bring it back. And then there are those who compete for sport and may have ridden a particular horse, found it suited them perfectly and want to continue riding a clone of that horse in competition. He says he also works with Viagen in the US, helping them to clone pets for Australian customers.

John Farren-Price: If someone in Australia would like to clone their dog or their cat, we can take the biopsy here in Australia, culture that biopsy, get it into safe storage, and then it allows them enough time to then send those cell lines over to Viagen in the States, where they'll clone the dog or the cat there, and then send the puppy or the kitten back into Australia.

James Bullen: He says they get about three or four enquiries a month. They've thought about starting pet cloning themselves, but are staying away for now. For a horse clone at least, it'll set you back about $50,000. But John says it's as much about love as business.

John Farren-Price: A lot of people can make a nice margin, but it basically just, you know, it's not something that they'll retire on. So there's got to be a lot of love involved. You've been around the farm for the last couple of hours, and you only have to see these clones and look at what they, how incredible they are. It's pretty special.

Peter de Kruijff: You might be wondering what the regulations are around cloning in Australia. The answer is, for animals cloned commercially, there aren't really any. Cloning of humans is absolutely banned. Thank the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction Act of 2002 for that.

Even in the US, it wasn't the cloning that got Jack Schubarth – it was the illegal trafficking of animals and materials into the US and across various state borders.

Aside from the commercial world, there's also been some use of cloning in medical research. And of course, the regulations around how animals can be cloned and for what purpose are very strict. But while it's possible, for medical research, cloning remains more hope than substance, so far.

Russell Bonduriansky: Some of the rationale for trying to clone rhesus monkeys, for example, is that they're a really important research model in medicine because they're so similar to humans in their physiology. And so the idea is that for medical research and for other kinds of research, to make genetically identical individuals that can be used as replicates in a study.

Peter de Kruijff: Not too many monkey clones have been created. It should work, in theory. 

Russell Bonduriansky: So for example, a Japanese group was able to clone mice and create hundreds of individuals from a single donor individual, single nucleus from a single mouse. And these mice are, at least in terms of their DNA sequence, they're pretty much identical. And so research on those mice can then avoid the kind of problems that come from unwanted genetic variation.

So if we're interested in how those mice might react to a particular medication, or how they might react to a particular environment, we can eliminate the kind of variation that normally exists by using genetically identical individuals.

Peter de Kruijff: But on the animal testing front, with cloning of monkeys still highly inefficient and challenging, and with ethics of this area highly contested and controversial, we might also increasingly look to non-animal solutions.

Kim Fung: Non-animal models is a kind of multifaceted approach that scientists are developing to essentially the three R's of animal research, to reduce, refine and reuse.

Peter de Kruijff: Dr Kim Fung is a principal research scientist at the CSIRO, working in the area of non-animal models.

Kim Fung: And the aim of this is to phase out animal testing in medical research over time. It's multifaceted in the sense that it brings together many different areas of science in an integrated way. So we're looking at combining tissue-derived or stem cell-derived cells and creating advanced cell models or three-dimensional cell models of an organ or a tissue.

Peter de Kruijff: You might have heard of some of these. These models can be organoids, lab-grown mini-organs that we can use for testing, or even different organoids that link together to make a human body system. It's still early days though.

Kim Fung: Because what the non-animal models don't have at the moment is that full physiological response. We can't get that whole body response. You may have a drug that will kill cancer cells, but then that drug will also kill normal cells that you don't want to kill, or affect your heart, for instance, or your kidneys, or your liver metabolism and whatnot.

Peter de Kruijff: You can see these with animal testing. Not so with non-human models like organoids. Yet.

Kim Fung: I think a decade from now, I would definitely think and believe that we would have reduced the number of animals that are used in medical research. I think we would have refined the non-animal models to a point where there is a spot in that pre-clinical phase of drug testing where they do fit.

Peter de Kruijff: 30 years on from Dolly the Sheep, advances in cloning might not grab the headlines like they used to. You may see it pop up now and again. But it doesn't mean the technology hasn't been developing to the point that pet, horse and cattle cloning is readily available to the public. And animal cloning in medical research is still in the works … but may be superseded by other technologies.

Oh yeah, before you go, you may also be wondering what happened to Montana Mountain King, our cloned Marco Polo Argali sheep. Well, he's been on a bit of a journey. A journey that involves an interstate move and two name changes.

Archive: Meet Tilek, an argali sheep with a complicated past.

Peter de Kruijff: Yep, from the grandiose Montana Mountain King to Tilek, which is really quite lovely.

Archive: Tilek’s name means dream in English. But his journey started more like a nightmare.

Peter de Kruijff: But you already know that part. Then in 2021, Montana Mountain King was moved from Montana to a wildlife centre in Oregon for care and rehabilitation, where he was renamed Dodge. He stayed there for more than three years. And then earlier this year, he was placed at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York. He's gone from a terrible situation to now where he's in an extremely good situation.

Archive: Like a dream.

Peter de Kruijff: That's it for the first episode of Artificial Evolution, which was made on the lands of the Gadigal, Wadjuk Noongar and Menang Noongar people.

Thanks to producer Fiona Pepper, senior producer James Bullen and sound engineer Angie Grant.

Next episode, you might have seen some headlines about a US biotech bringing dire wolves to life earlier this year. But could this technology be used to safeguard native species on home soil?

Stephen Frankenberg: I think there's probably not enough awareness of how close the technology really is to be able to engineer these solutions.

Peter de Kruijff: That's coming up on episode two of Artificial Evolution, a special four-part series for Science Fiction on ABC Radio National. You can follow Science Fiction on the ABC Listen app to listen to the whole back catalogue of the show. I'm Peter de Kruijff. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.