Reincarnation Of The Cat

The Indian cheetah was declared extinct some years ago. But the feline could well make a comeback with the Iranian government agreeing to gift a donor cheetah for cloning to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. Efforts to get an Asiatic cheetah had been on for almost two years but the ccmb scientists encountered one roadblock after another. The cheetah project got a boost with Iran’s President Mohammed Khatami visiting Hyderabad earlier this year. A cell from the donor would be cloned to form an embryo which would be placed in the uterus of an Indian leopard. The surrogate mother would then deliver a baby cheetah. If the cloning is successful, more cheetahs would be cloned to be released in the wild.