Now China will clone the giant panda

“Within five years, we hope to have some result, but it could take 10 in the worst-case scenario,” said senior reproductive biologist Chen Dayuan, who is leading a team of six scientists working full time on the effort.

Unlike Scotland’s Dolly the sheep – the arrival of which sent shock waves through the world’s scientific community last year – the panda clones would be carried and delivered by a surrogate mother of entirely different species, he told AFP.

Otherwise, cloning would be of little help to the species, as one of the top existing problems is the extreme scarcity of fertile femalepandas, he said.Genetic material obtained from an adult panda’s body cell would be substituted Into one of the surrogate mother’s own egg cells and then returned to the uterus to impregnate the surrogate, Chen said.

A bear, cat or dog might bear the panda clone until birth.“It’s a difficult choice,” he said, because the surrogate animal must have a similar gestation period and genetic makeup.

Cost is an issue because successful genetic transfers are a hit-and-miss process at this stage, he said, adding that it took 434 recombined eggs to yield one Dolly .

“And what we are trying to do will be much more difficult than Dolly … the reproductive idiosyncrasies of pandas bring a lot of trouble,” Chen said.

The species’ naturally high rate of infertility, worsened by inbreeding, is a key factor behind its declining population.

Some 1,000 pandas remain in mountainous areas of southwestern China’s Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces, and only one in 10 pandas are believed able to matenaturally.

Artificial insemination and hormone-injection techniques have improved success with breeding in captivity, but of some 182 pandas born in reserves and zoos since 1963, only a third survived beyond infancy, an expert at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Centre in Chengdu said.

Ye Zhiyong, the centre’s senior veterinary specialist, said the government would certainly approve of cloning, as pandas are nearly extinct and “will die out” with out human intervention in their breeding.

“The only problem we have are money and technology,” he said.