One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save – Wired.co.uk

MATSON, A TALL man who bounds around at high speed and wears three-quarter length shorts even when hes sporting a lab coat, says that he got into the artificial insemination business because he was in the right place at the right time. He dropped out of school at 16 and went straight into horse racing, first as a jockey. An unsuccessful foray into point-to-point racing and breeding followed, until an accident that caused the death of a mare pushed him towards the field of artificial insemination.

For over three decades, his focus was horse breeding and, later, cloning domestic animals for people who want to replace their beloved pets. Then, in 2018, he had a brainwave at a conference in the US, where he had struck up a partnership with cloning company Viagen to transfer frozen tissue through Europe more easily. I thought, if we can do that with cats and dogs and horses, why can't we do this with rare breeds?

When he first approached Chester Zoo with his idea, he says, they didnt quite slam the door in my face but werent interested in cloning for conservation. They said no, this is a bit too Frankenstein work, there has to be a certain line that you have to be careful not to cross. But that's all changed now.

Traditionally, zoos have wanted nothing to do with cloning, says Sue Walker, head of science at Chester Zoo and co-founder of Nature's SAFE. Cloning a single animal is expensive, has a high rate of failure, and may produce animals that are highly stressed, or die early. It is much better to concentrate on saving species from the extinction vortex through repopulation and habitat preservation schemes. But, as time runs out, and the chances for a species survival become more limited, artificial insemination and, in extreme cases, cloning may be the best or only option.

On a cold morning in March, Matson gives me a tour of his farm in Whitchurch, Shropshire. On the ground floor of the main building are cryogenic vats that store cell samples. The small ones look like milk churns; two large ones look like giant vats. When Matson climbs up onto a small step and opens one, billowing vapour streams out. Inside, floating around in designated compartments are thousands of tiny, cocktail straw-sized test tubes, each filled with race horse DNA.

This is liquid nitrogen, he says, poking his bare hand into the big cryogenic canister. This is minus-196 degrees, right? It suspends everything in animation. To preserve the cells, Matsons team mixes them with a cryoprotectant, which acts as a barrier to protect the biological tissue from freezing damage he likens it to antifreeze. Last year, he says, his company exported about 60,000 worth of semen to 21 different countries.

In the next room, Natures SAFE has a designated cryogenic canister: a yellow urn the size of a barstool, currently representing a much smaller portion of samples than the horse semen vats. Were definitely going to need more space, Matson says. We really are in a fight against time. In theory, we need 50 different samples for each species to keep going. Gathering at least 50 samples should give scientists sufficiently diverse genetic material to make a meaningful difference to an endangered species; if you cloned animals from the same sample, they would be genetically identical and therefore incapable of creating a viable population.

After touring the labs, Matson says he would like to show me the bread and butter of what takes place here. He leads me to an empty, roofed space. On the right, theres what looks like a big, square-ended vaulting horse, propped up at an angle. Behind it are two stables: one housing a rather quiet black mare, the second empty.

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One man's plan to resurrect the animal species we can't save - Wired.co.uk