Chinese scientists have succeeded in cloning a cow with genes for resistance to mad-cow disease, the official Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.
The birth of the 121-pound (55-kilogram) calf in the eastern province of Shandong comes three years after a team led by now-disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk cloned cows with a protein structure resistant to mad-cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.
"Scientists with the Laiyang Agro-Science Institute in Shandong said they used gene-transplant technology to introduce the genes to the calf cloned from cells of an adult cow," Xinhua said.
The research was led by Dong Yajuan and Bo Xuejin — who succeeded in cloning China's first and second healthy cows in 2001 — in collaboration with a Japanese university.
State television reported that further tests would be required on the calf as it grows to verify the effectiveness of the transplanted genes.
