Save habitats, not just individual species 
Shortsighted Biotech
Ellen Goodman: Syndicated Columnist 19oct00

IN IOWA THERE is a cow as ordinary as her name: Bessie. Only one thing distinguishes Bessie from the rest of the herd: she is about to give birth to a gaur instead of a calf.

No one knows what this Midwestern mother will make of her foreign offspring.

Will she regard the ox-like Asian animal as an ugly duckling of a cow? Or a swan of a son?

This is not a character out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

It's science, not fiction -- a story of endangered species and reproductive technology, of human creation and, I suppose, human destruction.

Our gal Bessie is the surrogate mother of the world's first cloned endangered species.

The animal she is carrying was cloned from a single cell of a dead gaur and implanted by scientists from Advanced Cell Technology for a cross-species pregnancy.

These researchers have given the bull-to-be a name of biblical proportions. They call him "Noah."

He is, after all, born to be the first passenger on an ark they are building as a rescue ship from environmental catastrophe.

The "spindly-legged little Noah will trot in a new day in the conservation of his kind as well as in the preservation of many other endangered species," write the scientists who cloned and implanted this offspring.

In Scientific American, they say he will "be just the first creature up the ramp of the ark of endangered species."

Well, I want to share their birthday celebration. This is, after all, progress in the biotech ability to save a species, one member at a time.

We have already seen in-vitro fertilization of both a panda and a gorilla. We've had a cross-species pregnancy between antelopes. And last year an ordinary house cat gave birth to an African wild cat.

Now, those who put Noah in Bessie's womb plan to clone an endangered Sumatran tiger, and even an extinct bucardo mountain goat.

Such creatures increase the gene pool, and if you'll forgive another water image, offer some insurance policy against the flood tide of extinction.

But I can't help thinking that while "spindly-legged little Noah" is going up the ramp, about a hundred species are becoming extinct every day.

While a handful of scientists are laboriously applying the most advanced technology to reproduce one endangered creature, people are using the simplest of tools -- from a match to a machete -- to eliminate habitats of hundreds more.

Indeed, the news bulletin from the frontiers of biotechnology is a reminder of the stunning gap in the environmental behavior of our own species.

On the one hand, a growing, needy, world population eliminates nature day by day.

Meanwhile, a handful of sophisticated scientists works overtime in the lab to imitate what should come naturally.

The new cloning of endangered species raises a host of questions about our relationship to nature.

Every environmentalist, including the scientists behind Noah, speak up for the primary importance of saving habitats. But what does it mean to save a species if and when its habitat is being destroyed? Do we save it for life on an Iowa farm? Or a zoo? Or a frozen zoo?

The gaur itself, a one-ton creature of India and South Asia, once hunted for food and sport, is now as threatened as the bamboo jungles and grasslands that were its home.

What kind of a future is there with Bessie?

The last bucardo mountain goat died earlier this year in Spain, but its cells were frozen. Is it truly "extinct" or just waiting for resurrection?

Can we comfort ourselves with a freezer full of cells as species disappear and the wild itself becomes extinct?

Animals such as elephants and primates exist not only as individuals but as tribes.

They live and learn in their place. Do we change their nature by saving them one at a time? Is a gaur raised by a cow still a gaur?

Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo, also sees the poignancy in the progress. We are watching habitats destroyed and creatures cloned at the same time. But hanging on to hope, he welcomes this birth announcement: "After nature comes back from the brink, people will be grateful."

Maybe so. Maybe the cloning of endangered species is not just a scientific parlor trick. But when Noah takes his first steps in Iowa, think about a much larger ark -- the size of a whole planet.

Goodman is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Her e-mail is ellengoodman@globe.com

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