LONDON: The company that helped to clone Dolly the sheep said yesterday that it had also cloned a calf.

"Mr Jefferson", a healthy 44,5kg Holstein breed, was born in Virginia on February 16, President's Day in the United States, said PPL Therapeutics chief Mr Julian Cooper.

But unlike Dolly, whose creation a year ago made international headlines and sparked fears that human cloning would not be far off, Mr Jefferson was produced by nuclear transfer from a foetal cell, not from an adult cell line.

"This is an important development. The technique used was similar to that used to produce Dolly and the world's first cloned transgenic lamb, Polly," Cooper said.

"While the calf is not transgenic (carrying a human gene), we have shown we can do the difficult part and this success now opens the way to producing transgenic cows using nuclear transfer, Polly having proved the principle," he added.

PPL is one of the world's leading companies in the transgenic production of human proteins for therapeutic use.

Scotland's Roslin Institute and PPL, its commercial partner, announced the arrival of Dolly, the first successful cloning of an adult animal, exactly a year ago.

Although Dolly was born in July 1996, the news of her arrival and the cloning technique was not published until February 1997.

Polly, the world's first transgenic lamb, came several months later and now scientists have shown they can use the technique to produce cattle.

"From a commercial point of view, the most important feature is the ability to produce small clones of transgenic animals from modified cells," said PPL's managing director, Dr Ron James.

The scientific euphoria over Dolly was dampened recently when some scientists questioned whether Dolly was really a true clone.

- Reuter