From cloning to CRISPR: The center that created Dolly designs epidemic-resistant animals
“Am I tired of answering questions about Dolly? Not at all, she was transformative,” explains Bruce Whitelaw, who runs the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh. Whitelaw, wearing a tartan jacket and tie, greets EL PAÍS and explains the new direction of his animal science research center: “We now do fantastic science, we have created pigs resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome. The number of farmers going bankrupt because of this disease is enormous. It has a huge impact, agreed, but it will not be as big as Dolly. She was unique.”
Although the institute remains linked to the name of a sheep — the first mammal cloned from an adult cell — they have long since abandoned animal cloning altogether. They are now dedicated to using the enormous power of gene editing — CRISPR technology, which modifies DNA in a cheap, simple and incredibly effective way — to create breeds of farm animals that are more robust, resistant to different types of production stress such as heat or drought, and above all, to diseases.
The diseases studied at Roslin make up a long list of woes for livestock, poultry and, sometimes, human health, and which seem straight out of Oliver Twist: porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, classical swine fever, African swine fever, avian flu, West Nile virus, Newcastle disease, those caused by bacteria and complex pathogens such as toxoplasmas or trypanosomes. The new outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, those that manage to jump from animals to humans (such as this summer on dairy farms in the USA affected by bird flu where 14 people have been infected to date), once again demonstrate the close relationship between the health of farm animals and human life.
