Odd enough, for sure. But the new foal's name?
"Paris Texas."
That's my hometown. No, honest-to-goodness, it is. It's in northeastern Texas. My parents still live there. And Cindy's mom lives there, too. How weird is that? There's gotta be a story behind the name; I hope it comes out in the news because I'd like to know why they named the first U.S.-cloned horse after my hometown.
UPDATE: Okay, I went to my hometown's newspaper of record, The Paris News, and found the straight scoop on the colt's name:
COLLEGE STATION -- A colt cloned by researchers at Texas A&M University bears the name Paris Texas.
"At least it wasn't a mule," Paris Mayor Curtis Fendley said Thursday. An A&M graduate, Fendley said he knows little about genetic engineering.
"I know there is scientific reasoning for it, but being an A&M business major it's over my head," Fendley said.
Community leader Ridley Briggs said he is not surprised by the name.
"It doesn't surprise me that the greatest university in the world has placed the name of Paris Texas on this accomplishment because Paris, Texas is the greatest city in the world," Briggs said from his lake home at Cypress Springs.
Briggs is a 1954 A&M graduate and a recent director of the Texas A&M Association of Former Students. The Aggie guru was named an A&M Fish Camp namesake in 2002.
School officials announced that their partnership with a French company resulted in the cloning and was a major factor in the horse's name.
"When you pair Texas with France then Paris, Texas is the logical outcome," said Gary Vest, president and chief executive officer of the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce.
"After all, we got our name because of the many French settlers here," Vest said.
A&M officials believe this is the first successfully cloned horse in North America. Horses had previously been cloned in Italy.
The six-week old light brown foal made his public debut Wednesday. He whinnied and walked right up to several photographers who snapped his picture.
"Look at him, he's gorgeous," Katrin Hinrichs, the lead scientist on the project, said.
"He's very bold," said Hinrichs, a professor at Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine. She also heads the school's Equine Embryo Laboratory.
A&M researchers used adult horse skin cells biopsied from a valuable horse in Europe to clone the foal, which was born March 13.
The process, which took 400 attempts over a four-month period, began with dividing the skin cells in an incubator. Horse eggs were also matured in an incubator. Just before the eggs were fertilized, they were taken out. Under a microscope, researchers removed the DNA.
The biopsied skin cells were then injected into the eggs, which were then allowed to divide and make an embryo. The embryo was then placed into the uterus of a horse. Six embryos were created but only one, Paris Texas, was successfully gestated in a host horse named Greta during a pregnancy that lasted 12 1/2 months. Horses usually have an 11-month gestation period.
"It's very inefficient at this point. People worry that we're going to produce all these cloned champions and they're going to go to horse shows and change the face of showing horses," Hinrichs said.
There are no guarantees that Paris Texas will turn out exactly the same as the donor horse but the foal's offspring will have the same characteristics, Hinrichs said.
"Really it's a method to save genetics," she said.
The knowledge acquired from the successful cloning of the horse should be a powerful tool that will allow scientists to better compare the differential affects of environment and heredity, nature versus nurture, Hinrichs said.
"It will be able to bring the frontiers of science forward, using the horse as a model," she said.
Hinrichs said the procedure could also one day be used by the private industry to clone horses. Cryozootech, A&M's Paris-based partner, is dedicated to preserving the genes of exceptional horses for their use in producing cloned offspring.
With Paris Texas, A&M has become the first academic institution in the world to clone six different species.
The first cloned cat was born at the school on Dec. 22, 2001. Since then the university has cloned several litters of pigs, a Boer goat, a disease-resistant Angus bull, the first Brahma bull and a deer.
Hey, what does Mayor Fendley have against mules, anyway? My dad raises mules on his 80-acre tick farm north of Paris. Mules, chickens and catfish. And the occasional herd of feral pigs.
Anyway, I just think that's way cool. I could live without the French connection, of course, but those pesky French keep turning up when you least expect them.
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