Texas A&M leads the world in cloning animals

The Associated Press released a fascinating and disturbing story the other day regarding how my alma mater Texas A&M leads the world in cloning animals. Allow me to summarize (via selectively edited excerpts, of course)...

Through painstaking experimentation, A&M is the world's first academic institution to clone six species in six years: cattle, a boer goat, pigs, a deer, a horse and - most famously - a cat named cc. (Michelle Thew of the Animal Protection Institute faults Texas A&M for trying to clone a dog and promoting the idea of pet cloning when millions of animals remain in shelters.) But for all the technological breakthroughs, A&M researchers say only 1 percent to 5 percent of cloning procedures succeed. "Animal cloning has resulted in a lot of issues with deaths and deformities that have been the norm, not the exception," said Lisa Archer, a spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth. She said an A&M study released in 2002 documented a 94 percent failure rate in efforts to clone pigs. Twenty-eight piglets were born without an anus and tail, a fatal condition.

Holy mother of crap!