He questioned whether the complexity and cost of cloning pandas was worthwhile when they could be artificially inseminated, and argued that it was banks of endangered animals' eggs and sperm, rather than tissue, which needed to be created to preserve genetic diversity. Professor David Macdonald, director of the wildlife conservation unit at Oxford University, was more equivocal. Reconstituting something that's extinct, while having a certain fascination, is less urgent than saving more things from becoming extinct. But I'm not saying this is a waste of time, trivial or wrong. Dr Lanza denied he and his colleagues wanted to make cloning the focus of conservation.
Habitat conservation is the cornerstone of all preservation efforts.
But this is a tool to rescue genes that would be otherwise lost. Fewer than a thousand remain in their shrinking natural habitat in south-west China, with 100 in zoos. They have sex rarely, dislike breeding in captivity and are picky eaters. Chinese scientists have produced cloned panda embryos by inserting a panda cell nucleus into a rabbit egg. US scientists hope to use black bear eggs and surrogate mothers.