Vet who cloned mule dies
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Aug 24, 2009
Vet who cloned mule dies
BOISE (Idaho) - GORDON Woods, a veterinary scientist who helped
create Idaho Gem, the world's first cloned mule, has died. He was 57.
Dr Woods passed away unexpectedly on Thursday, said Dell Rae
Moellenberg, a spokesman at Colorado State University in Fort Collins,
Colorado, where Dr Woods was a professor in the College of Veterinary
Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
Dr Woods died at the Medical Centre of the Rockies in Loveland,
Colorado.
'He was a brilliant scientist,' said Dirk Vanderwall, who worked with Dr
Woods on the mule-cloning project at the University of Idaho, and who
is now an associate professor and chief of the Section of Reproduction
at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
'Over the last 30 years he's conducted groundbreaking research in
several different areas.'
In 2003, Dr Woods, Mr Vanderwall and Ken White of Utah State
University led a team that cloned Idaho Gem as part of a larger project
intended to better understand human diseases.
The University of Idaho 'beat a number of other teams around the
world trying to clone a member of the horse family,' said Bill Loftus, a
spokesman at UI. The mule clone, one of three produced at the
university, went on to success on the mule racing circuit in Nevada and
California.
But Woods was looking for more than just race results from the clones.
Horses and other equines have significantly lower cancer rates than
humans, and scientists hope cloning will illuminate the difference and
provide research clues, particularly into calcium's role in diseases.
Equines have much less calcium within cell walls than humans.
'That certainly was another primary focus of Gordon's,' Mr Vanderwall
said. 'To use the horse as a model to try to understand age-onset
diseases in people. Gordon's hypothesis was that excessive
intracellular calcium in human cells could be an underlying factor in
age-onset diseases.' Dr Woods had been continuing his research in
that area.
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commented
Dr Woods grew up in northern Idaho and received an undergraduate
degree from the University of Idaho and his doctor of veterinary
medicine degree at Colorado State University. He later received
another doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin.
In 1986 he returned to Idaho and founded the Northwest Equine
Reproduction Laboratory, then joined the University of Idaho in 1988
as a professor in the Department of Animal and Veterinary Science. He
left the school in 2007 to work at Colorado State.
Mr Vanderwall said Dr Woods is survived by his wife and four adult
8/24/2009 10:47 AM
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