The small brown mouse was born in a cramped laboratory on the University of Hawai'i's Manoa campus on Oct. 3, 1997, but from the instant she drew breath, Cumulina was destined to become an international celebrity in scientific circles.
Cumulina was a clone. Not the first clone in history, but the first proof that someone else could reproduce a successful cloning experiment that was done earlier that year in Scotland.
Cumulina was the first of more than 50 mice cloned over three generations by Ryuzo Yanagimachi. Her photograph appeared in scientific journals and newspapers around the world and gave star status to Yanagimachi, a professor in the Department of Anatomy and Reproductive Biology at the university's John A. Burns School of Medicine.
Until Cumulina, researchers had been unable to duplicate the process that cloned Dolly, a lamb in Scotland.
The cloning technique used by the UH team involved removing the cell nucleus from a donor egg and replacing it with genetic material from the cell of another adult mouse. That egg then is stimulated with a chemical to jump-start cell division and after that, it is implanted into a surrogate mother. Scientists called it "The Honolulu Technique."
Cumulina lived seven months longer than the average lab mouse, dying in her sleep in May 2000. Yanagimachi said "she was a good girl" and planned to have Cumulina stuffed and mounted.
