New Scientist reports that the animal cloning team at Texas A&M University has succeeded in making five cloned copies of a champion sire. The horse, a stallion with the unlikely name of Smart Little Lena, has won $750,000 on the cowboy/rodeo circuit, and his foals have won a combined total of $36 million. That’s some horse. Now that the animal is coming to the end of its life, the Equine Embryo Laboratory has stepped in and made five copies.

This is not the first cloned horse. That was Paris Texas, who was also foaled at Texas A&M University, on March 13, 2005. Texas A&M was also the first to clone a cat, and has since succeeded in cloning goats, disease-resistant bulls, a deer, and pigs by the litterful.

Cloning has a bad name in science fiction, but it is going to revolutionise biology. Firstly, it will tell us how much of our development is genetically encoded and how much is “emergent”, that is, left to the interplay of cellular and sub-cellular processes as the embryo matures. We will also learn a great deal about epigenetics, the study of genetic processes that are mediated not by the sequence of DNA but by such processes as methylation and imprinting, and probably many other factors we don’t even know about. And finally, it will help tease out a little more of the knotted question of nature vs. nurture. Forget the scare stories, the horror films and novels. They’re no more relevant to the science of cloning than the fact you can murder someone with a car says anything about the morals of internal combustion engines. The real and future story is going to be far more interesting as it unfolds.

I have a personal interest in this because an old story of mine uses the cloning of thoroughbred champion horses as an important background plot. The story is “Lacey’s Fingerprints” from Agog! 2 or my collection Written in Blood (or the first Borderlands convention book, but your chances of finding a copy are near zero). It’s oddly comforting to see one’s stories come to life. Except…no, I’ll save that tale for another day.