Test-tube pandas

-- (Credit: Sunjay ghosh)scientists in China are attempting for the first time to create a test-tube panda. Since the beginning of this year, China's Laboratory of Genetic Embryo Engineering on Endangered Wildlife has been equipped to attempt this experiment. The only ingredients missing were the female panda eggs. But when the laboratory heard of a death of a 17-year-old female giant panda on August 4, a team of scientists led by one of China's foremost panda experts, Zhang Anju, removed the dead panda's ovaries. Since the egg was immature, they cultured it first in the laboratory. Unfortunately, the experiment was unsuccessful due to the excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the incubator.

Notwithstanding reproductive shortcomings in the pandas -- female pandas are fertile only for a few days in a year and the male ones often have a low sperm count problem -- the main threat to its survival is mankind's destruction of its natural habitat. Since 1949, one-third of the forest cover in Sichuan, where most pandas live, have been felled. There are only an estimated 1,000 pandas left in the wild.