A mule’s life

On the edge of the University of Idaho campus, there is a farm that is home to many animals, all of which were born the old-fashioned way — where the male’s sperm fertilizes the female’s egg.

All except for one

A mule named Utah Pioneer was born from a petri dish. Utah Pioneer is a clone.

He was born in 2003 along with two others, Idaho Gem and Idaho Star. They were immediately thrown into the limelight, as a result of their unusual birth.

The mules went to fairs around the country, with news cameras constantly in their faces and they even had their own trading cards.

Life has since calmed down for the three. Utah Pioneer still resides at UI, enjoying retired life, rolling in mud and eating all the grass he can. Life is easy for the cloned mule today, but getting there was difficult.

The process started in 1997, when Idaho businessman and mule-racing enthusiast, Don Jacklin, wanted to create the perfect racing mule.

He saw Scottish scientists were able to clone a sheep, so he presented the challenge to a team of UI researchers to clone a horse or a mule.

“He laid down the challenge and then had the money to help the project along,” said Bill Loftus, public information officer for the College of Agriculture and Life Science.

Armed with Jacklin’s financial support, the team of UI researchers embarked on a mission to produce the first clone of a horse or mule.

How it’s done

Cloning is only a two-day process, Loftus said.

After taking an egg from a mare, they put it under a microscope, take a fine micropipette and suck out all the mare’s DNA and chromosomes, Loftus said. Next, they take a mule’s skin cell off a fetus and shock it with electricity to make the egg think it’s been fertilized.

Loftus said scientists keep the embryo in a broth-like substance until it starts dividing — this takes about one day. After that, the embryo is inserted into a mare, and from there, it should start developing normally, he said.

For the UI researchers few did, Loftus said. Out of 300 to 400 tries, only three developed and were born — Idaho Star, Utah Pioneer and Idaho Gem.

Loftus said the UI team took the clones around the country to find additional funding for further research.

“Our scientist thought it was really important for people to understand cloning,” Loftus said. “Most people will never see one in person in their life time … They could really see the animal up close and talk to the scientist about it.”

Using clones to understand cancer

“We had really high hopes in 2003 — when these clones were born — that they’d give us information on how the cells worked,” Loftus said. “That was really the hope for the cloning project, was to take that information and figure out what was going on when cells turn cancerous and why they started dividing if unchecked and if we could figure out how to regulate that and maybe stop cancer.”

Loftus said Gordon Woods, the lead scientist of the project, had a strong hypothesis and was making progress with the research, before he died unexpectedly at the age of 57.

Woods sought out to understand how cancer worked in the body, Loftus said. There is no record of a stallion developing prostate cancer, but human males are more prone to the disease as they age.

Woods thought one of the reasons men get cancer while horses don’t was all in the diet, Loftus said.

Most people in the West consume diets with a lot of red meat, which contains zinc. In contrast, people in Eastern countries eat diets high in cadmium, an element most commonly found in grassy foods. While horses don’t often consume diets high in zinc, cadmium is a staple in their diet.

In a study Woods conducted, men who were on the Eastern diet had fewer incidents of prostate cancer than men who were on the Western diet.

Utah chews on hay with some fellow horses in a pasture near the other farm animals located past the meat lab. Utah is the University of Idaho’s cloned mule.

Tobacco is another product that contains cadmium, Loftus said.

“I think for smokers, the incidents for prostate cancer is lower,” he said. “So is the cadmium helping them in that way? It’s killing them in other ways, though.”

Loftus said Woods was gathering the data and making progress, but when he died, the project fell to the wayside and nobody has taken it up since.

The racing world

“When we cloned the mules, nobody else in the world had been able to clone a member of the horse family,” Loftus said. “Our mules were cloned from a mule fetus that was produced by the two parents of world champion racing mules.”

These mules served multiple purposes, one of which was to try them out at the track.

Idaho Star and Idaho Gem won their first races, but Utah Pioneer didn’t take to the training and never made it out to the track, Loftus said.

Retirement

It’s been some time since the three mules were in the news, and have since gone their separate ways.

The youngest, Idaho Gem, is privately owned and living in Hayden, Idaho, Loftus said. The oldest, Idaho Star, is owned by Jacklin and is now a working mule on his farm. Utah Pioneer, the middle sibling, resides on the UI campus.

“(Utah Pioneer) just lives his day-to-day life in leisure with his three buddies here,” said Michael Gutierrez, the operations foreman responsible for taking care of Utah Pioneer.

Utah Pioneer lives with three mares, one of which is his surrogate mother. They aren’t being used productively anymore and have been brought out to live the retired life, Gutierrez said. Gutierrez described Utah Pioneer as an independent.

“He’s his own mule,” he said.

Utah Pioneer hasn’t had any race or work requests, Gutierrez said, and now that he’s 11, he seems comfortable where he is.

“They’re just living normal lives,” Loftus said. “It’s like a baseball player after he’s out of the major leagues. He’s still a human being, he still has an important life to lead, he’s just not in the show anymore, just like these mules.”

Korbin McDonald can be reached at [email protected]