DEVELOPMENT-CUBA: Cloning of “Miracle Cow” Remains a Dream

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta - Tierramérica*

HAVANA, Oct 18 2002 (IPS) - The unlimited duplication of Ubre Blanca is the dream hounding a team of scientists in Cuba, bent on cloning the “supercow” that in January 1982 produced 109.5 litres of milk in a single day, quadrupling an average cow’s daily output.

A month later, the famous animal, a Cuban F-2 Holstein-Cebú cross, broke another world record, by reaching a total output of 24,268.9 litres of milk in a 305-day lactation period.

The death of Ubre Blanca (White Udder) in 1985 did not leave her name in oblivion. A white marble statue pays tribute to her achievements, which are also recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records.

“How could I ever forget? That cow appeared every day in the newspapers. It seemed at the time we would eventually have many others like her,” Aurelio Ponce, a 43-year-old schoolteacher, told Tierramérica.

But Ubre Blanca never made it beyond serving as a symbol of incredible volumes of milk output. Cuban livestock production continues to lag behind the food demands of the island’s 11.2 million people.

Meanwhile, milk has become a luxury item on this socialist-run island. It is rationed and sold in Cuban pesos for children under age seven and for pregnant women only. If others want to obtain milk, they must pay for it with hard-to-come-by U.S. dollars.

According to the government’s official statistical almanac, in 1989 the country imported 38 percent of its dairy needs from the European socialist bloc of the era.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban imports from the bloc came to a halt, meaning that high quality livestock feed became unavailable. And milk production fell from 1.51 billion litres in 1985 to 590 million litres in 1995.

For years, scientists have been attempting to reproduce the prodigious Ubre Blanca by creating embryos cloned from frozen tissue samples. Her ova were also reportedly harvested while she was still alive, implying the possibility of in vitro fertilisation.

José Morales, director of the governmental Animal Improvement Research Centre, said earlier this year that the Ubre Blanca cloning project “is very important” to the president of this Caribbean island, Fidel Castro.

Morales acknowledged in 1999 that the possibility existed to clone the extraordinary animal, though pointed out that after 14 years of preserving her tissue samples, success could not be assured, due to potential deterioration of the “mother” source materials for the cloning process.

That same year, Fidel Oviedo, an expert with the state-run Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Centre, revealed that local laboratories had obtained embryos using cloning techniques and were preparing “to transfer them to cows”.

But it was not confirmed that the embryos came from cells of Ubre Blanca.

The reproductive method of cloning allows the production of an embryo using a cell from a single adult — it does not require fertilisation of an ovum by a sperm — by extracting the cellular nucleus and introducing it into another cell. The result is an individual with identical genetic material to that of the cell’s origin.

The first successful cloning procedure, which produced the sheep Dolly, took place in 1997, carried out by scientists at Scotland’s Roslin Institute.

However, the method continues to face numerous roadblocks. Oviedo cited the premature aging experienced by Dolly. “We have to wonder if the cloned calves would be able to produce as much milk as their progenitor (Ubre Blanca), or if by age eight they would already have reached old age.”

Cuba had hoped to produce its first cloned animal by 2001, but has yet to achieve that objective.

Brazil beat Cuba to the mark, becoming the Latin American pioneer in this field when its first cloned calf was born in March 2001: “Vitoria da EMBRAPA”, named after the research centre that made her life possible.

She was born weighing 50 kilos, considered “large, but normal,” according to the parameters of the Simental, a cattle breed of Swiss origins, says Rodolfo Rumpf, coordinator of the project.

Rumpf’s team is currently testing more complicated procedures, such as those used in the cloning of Dolly, to make a clone an adult animal via the transfer of its genetic material to an ovum that has no nucleus.

While certain sectors of society may object to cloning, Latin American scientists — in Cuba, Brazil and elsewhere — continue working to improve these scientific techniques, their ultimate goal being to improve productivity in agriculture, and provide food for their countries’ populations.

* Tierramérica is a specialised news service (www.tierramerica.net) produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.