Poaching has driven the Isfahan mouflon close to extinction in Iran, where scientists are hailing the rare successful example of interspecies cloning

A domestic sheep has given birth to a baby mouflon in a rare successful example of interspecies cloning, according to scientists in Iran.

The wild Isfahan mouflon – or ovis orientalis isphahanica – was cloned by researchers at Iran’s Royan Institute, which is dedicated to reproductive biomedicine and stem cell research, using the domestic sheep as a surrogate mother.

Poaching has driven the Isfahan mouflon close to extinction in Iran. The cloned mouflon, which looks similar to a deer, has been named Maral, a Persian name for a reindeer and for new babies, which means svelte.

Established in 1991, Royan has been a pioneer of IVF in the Islamic republic, where infertile couples have easy access to such treatments at reasonable costs compared to western equivalents. It has also drawn many tourist patients from across the Middle East. Iran has progressive fertility treatment and reproductive health programmes, with Shia clerics in the country largely supportive of such scientific practices.

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Mohammad Hossein Nasr-Esfahani, the head of the biomedical research centre at Royan, said the motivation for the project was conservation. Royan became the first place in the Middle East to start working on animal cloning seven years ago and the birth of Maral marks the first successful attempt at interspecies cloning involving an endangered species in the country.

“We have been working on the project for around four years,” he told the Guardian. “Conservation of wildlife is an important concept in developing countries, and so far a few successful projects involving birth of wild animals by interspecies cloning have been achieved worldwide.”

To clone animals scientists take cells from one individual and insert them into an unfertilised donor egg which then develops into an embryo. In this case, the embryo was carried by a surrogate sheep, after a biopsy had been obtained from a mouflon. Domestic sheep oocytes were taken from abattoir ovaries, and the best embryos were transferred to the surrogate sheep.

Nasr-Esfahani said: “The cloning technique is very efficient in our view, and so far we have cloned a herd of goats. The last sheep that we cloned lived for over five years. This mouflon is healthy and 14 days have passed since its birth. We hope to donate the sheep to the city zoo where they can provide a suitable habitat for it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Domestic sheep with the newborn mouflon. Photograph: ISNA

Cloning is controversial among animal welfare activists, who say cloned animals are more susceptible to abnormalities and die soon after birth. In 2009, cloning was used in an attempt to save an endangered goat species, the Pyrenean ibex, from extinction in Europe, but the newborn died shortly after birth due to breathing complications.

The most famous animal to be cloned was Dolly the sheep, born in 1996. Last year, the birth of Britain’s first cloned dog was dismissed as a “ridiculous waste of money”, while the quest to clone a mammoth has also been the subject of much controversy.

“From an animal welfare point of view, cloning is a very wasteful process,” said Penny Hawkins, head of the research animals department at RSPCA. “Large numbers of embryos would have been created and implanted into female sheep in order to get the cells to make those cloned embryos, animals may well have undergone painful procedures to obtain the tissue.”

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Hawkins said the ethical issues relate to “the inherently wasteful nature of the process”. She said: “It’s all very well cloning endangered species but if you haven’t got the natural habitat to put them into you can argue, what’s the point doing it at all? What’s the point manipulating animals and causing suffering and causing risks to the mother animals when maybe there’s the case that the population of endangered animals still can’t be saved because their habitat has been destroyed?”



Scientists may argue practice makes perfect. But Hawkins is not convinced. “It’s highly likely that the process will become more successful because procedures tend to be improved and refined and success rates tend to increase,” she said. “But the whole point is: is it right to use these sort of procedures to manipulate animals in this way with risk to their health and welfare?”



“There’s no point cloning endangered species if they have nowhere to live; you should look at the bigger picture, preserve the habitat as well and not just do something because you can. Just because something can be done it doesn’t mean it should be done.”

