How Middle Eastern Scientists Construct Winning Camels

Scientists in the Middle East are going to great lengths to try to produce winning camels. They're doing it through cloning.

“These babies, they are the cloned babies - they are copies of the elite animals,” says Dr. Nisar Wani, Scientific Director of the Reproductive Biotechnology Center in Dubai.

Dr. Wani's lab cloned the world’s first camel in 2009 and now copies dozens every year. Each one has the potential to win big bucks in competitions, whether on the track or in a beauty contest. “We are producing the exact genetic copy of an animal, which is not possible in any other technique,” he says.

Scientists first remove the DNA from a camel egg. “So, we collect these eggs from the slaughtered camels,” explains Dr. Wani. They then replace it with the DNA from other camels, like those who are valued for their speed or beauty.

As he opens a freezer at the lab, Dr. Wani explains, “This is like a storage, we can keep it for as many years as we want, 10, 20, 50.” The egg then develops into an embryo without the need for sperm, but the process doesn’t always cross the finish line. “From a hundred embryos that we transfer, we can have five to ten pregnancies, and sometimes maybe three to six babies,” he says.

If successful, those prized camels can be worth millions of dollars.

But while cloned camels are welcome, owners have been disqualified at camel beauty pageants for injecting camels with Botox and inflating body parts by using rubber bands to make them more attractive.