LIVESTOCK AUCTIONS ARE not normally the stuff of headlines, but then it’s not every day that cows as unusual as Dundee Paradise and Dundee Paratrooper are going under the hammer. The dairy cows were due to be sold at Easter Compton cattle market near Bristol, UK, last month, but at the last minute their owner withdrew them, reportedly unsettled by negative media coverage and local opposition.

 The problem? The cows’ mother was a clone, conceived in a laboratory from a cell taken from the ear of a prize-winning Holstein in Wisconsin. “A cow created in Frankenstein’s lab,” as one local newspaper put it.

 This episode was one of the opening skirmishes in what is shaping up to be a battle on par with that over genetically modified food. This time the issue is the production of meat and milk from cloned animals.

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One hundred years ago in a lab at Harvard University, a young zoology student was busily overseeing the breeding of pair after pair of brother and sister mice. The “Mouse Man”, as he was known on campus, was trying to create the first inbred lab animal – a strain of mouse whose genes would be stable and identical. Such a mouse would allow biologists to reliably replicate their experiments for the first time. His professor said it couldn’t be done, but the Mouse Man proved him wrong. We are all indebted to those inbred mice and their descendants, which have helped researchers develop treatments for a wide range of human diseases.

 IT BEGAN with one small mouse and a simple, if tedious, instruction. Clarence Cook Little was a Harvard undergraduate when his zoology professor thrust a live mouse across the lab bench and told him to learn everything he could about it. Little went one better. In the third year of his degree, in 1909, he created the first inbred strain of mouse, providing researchers with a homogeneous genetic background on which to experiment. Before that, they could never be certain whether the results of their research were genuinely the result of an experiment or stemmed from genetic inconsistencies in their test animals.

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