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the whole reason we did it is intellectual curiosity," he says. "I've always been fascinated by nature versus nurture. Tis is a real neat way to settle the question in my mind — well, not settle it, but give me more information. It's turned into the ultimate science experiment." Smart Little Lena Ten, of course, there's human nature, which cloning is powerless to amend. Take the story of Smart Little Lena. Jimmy Bankston, the Dallas car dealer, was part of the syndicate that owned the champion cutting horse. He got in when shares were $70,000 apiece. "Everybody thought I was absolutely crazy — I did too," he says. But the horse repaid the fee several times over. "It was the single best investment I ever made undescended testicles and an overbite went for $2,400. Te colt was labeled infertile. Another went for $3,000, and was also labeled infertile. Jack Waggoner, the rancher who recently sold High Brow Cat along with the ranch he lived on to Colt Ventures, bought one of the colts for $28,000, and Australian breeder Richard Bull bought another for $27,000. Te way Bankston tells it, the clone that sold for $3,000 at the Futurity sale was purchased by a woman who fell in love with the colt on sight. "Unbeknownst to her husband, she's bidding," he says. Te couple had a small ranch and no money to burn, and now the bidder also had an unhappy husband. Bankston ran into them as they were leading their new colt across the street. He recognized Smart Little Lena's twin, and learned "With artifcial insemination, you'd have fewer stallions, fewer mares, and you wouldn't be improving the breed." — Dan Rosenberg, former president of Three Chimneys farm in Versailles, Ky. in anything at anytime," Bankston says. So when Bill Freeman, Smart Little Lena's rider and trainer, proposed forming a syndicate and cloning the stallion, Bankston did his research and signed on. Freeman, who died in 2008, called Katrin Hinrichs, a veterinarian and professor at Texas A&M; University. He ofered money to support her cloning research if she used tissue from Smart Little Lena to conduct it. Hinrichs was no random selection. She was the frst person in North America to clone a horse, with the 2005 birth of a foal named Paris Texas. Te world's frst cloned horse, Promatea, was born in 2003 in Italy. Hinrichs liked Freeman's proposition. It gave her money for her lab and guaranteed a good home to any horses that resulted. Five cloned colts were born in 2006, all essentially identical twins of the champion Quarter Horse, and all born from a plug of connective tissue about half the size of a pea taken from the stallion's neck. Little Lena's clones were quickly tangled in what sometimes sounds like a wrong-sideof-the-track custody battle, complete with lawsuits and everyone arguing about money. When one of the colts came up with colic, Bankston ponied up the money for surgery, fguring it was an investment he'd get back. But surgery revealed tumors on the colt's kidneys and spine. "I never had a horse that young get cancers like that," he says. "It had something to do with being a clone." Te other four clone colts were sold in 2010 at the Futurity sale. One colt with 98 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 4.13 the couple were talking about gelding. "Let me make a few calls and see if I can make a few dollars for you," he told them. He found a buyer willing to pay $15,000. But by the time he returned to the couple, they'd sold the horse for about what they paid for it to a man named Jason Abraham. Big Biology Ranch Jason Abraham, 44, says high school biology was beyond him. He says he's extremely dyslexic. He went to college in what he calls "a little bitty school" in Clarendon, Texas — "we called it Harvard on the hill" — and earned a degree in ranch and feedlot operations. All he ever wanted to do was be a rancher and maybe raise horses. "We had several mares. I had a stallion, and I had a bunch of people want to breed to it," he says. "So I went to a short course at Colorado State on how to breed, and I fell in love with it, and I haven't looked back." By the early 2000s, his ranch performed embryo transfers for 2,500 recipient mares a year — a number that halved with the recession. Today, Abraham and his partner, veterinarian Gregg Veneklasen, have had a hand in the births of 164 cloned foals. So Abraham already had several clones on his ranch when he heard Smart Little Lena's clones were up for sale. "I was at Vegas at a rodeo when I heard," Abraham says. "I said, 'I don't really care what you buy; just fnd the ugliest one you can fnd, and the cheapest, and we'll take it.'" Although they are involved in the cloning world, Abraham and Veneklasen don't do any actual horse cloning — a lab at Abraham's ranch is for cloning deer, not horses. A company called ViaGen, which operates a laboratory in Alberta, Canada, does the horse cloning. Te lab moved to Canada from Texas when Texas horse slaughter operations closed. Te cloning operation, which uses horse eggs to reset the DNA from an adult donor cell in order to create an embryo, needs the large number of eggs a slaughterhouse can provide. ViaGen produces the embryos and ships them frozen to Veneklasen. Ten Veneklasen transplants that embryo into a surrogate mare. "We've cloned most of the Olympic jumping horses, almost all of the gold-medal jumping horses," Veneklasen says. "We've done some gold-medal dressage horses, one Peruvian Paso from Columbia. We've done lots of polo ponies." Tey even cloned the Paso Fino horse that belonged to Roberto Escobar Gaviria, brother of the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Te horse had been stolen by Pablo Escobar's enemies and castrated. In the not-too-distant future, the partners say, they'll be able to silence disease-related genes when they clone, which could spell the end of a variety of crippling inherited maladies. What seems like a bigger challenge is getting other horsemen to see this biological tinkering as the future. Right now, their biggest battle isn't with the letters of the genetic code; it's with the letters AQHA: the American Quarter Horse Association. Lawyers and Clones Although competitive organizations such as the National Cutting Horse Association and the National Barrel Horse Association rarely set limits on reproductive techniques, groups with a mission to maintain a breed's genetic heritage often rule on reproduction. Te Jockey Club, with its demand for live cover, is among the most restrictive. Behind that rule is a concern that artifcial insemination could drastically narrow Toroughbred genetic diversity, says Dan Rosenberg, a consultant who for 30 years was president of the famous Versailles, Ky., Toroughbred farm Tree Chimneys. Artifcial insemination removes all barriers of geography and physical capacity, making it that much easier for every mare owner to breed to only the most popular stallions. "With artifcial insemination, you'd have fewer stallions, fewer mares, and you wouldn't be improving the breed," Rosenberg says. "And you'd be fooding the gene pool with bad genes." continued on page 158