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For an orphan, he is remarkably happy. He pads innocently about the narrow confines of his pen, testing his legs with short, awkward steps, uncertain of his surroundings. Peering out, his big brown eyes seem to invite any visitor who happens by to stay awhile. But the only ones who come are the nice man who feeds him and the occasional doctor, who prods and pokes with a needle. He's used to the attention, even if no one ever wants to play.
He looks just like any other Holstein calf, a mottled canvas of black and white, with twitching ears and gangly legs. But he is most definitely different. Not because he has no mother or father, but because he never did.
Quarantined in one of the long barns at the Quebec Artificial Insemination Centre, a sprawling bovine-reproduction facility -- a stud centre -- in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Starbuck II is the next generation in genetic engineering. He was conceived in a Petri dish from frozen bits of skin tissue and brought to life by a few volts of electricity. He is a clone, and though there are perhaps a handful of cloned animals in Canada, there is none quite like Starbuck II. He is the genetic Xerox of a bull two years dead -- the original Starbuck -- and the first mammal in Canada created from the tissue cells of a mature animal as opposed to embryonic tissue.
It's been four years since a cloned Finn Dorset sheep named Dolly made history and stirred up international controversy. Despite the fuss, cloning is nothing new. The technology has been around for more than fifty years, ever since biologists Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned frogs from tadpole cells in 1942. The 1970s brought cloned fruit flies. About a decade and a few more steps up the evolutionary ladder later, mice and rabbits. And now, Starbuck II.
"It seems like every day a new animal is the subject of somebody's cloning experiment," says Dr. Lawrence Smith, head of the Centre for Research in Animal Reproduction in Saint-Hyacinthe, a community of about 40,000 located in the agricultural belt between Quebec City and Montreal. The potential of cloning, says Dr. Smith, ranges from the logical -- cloning an...