Sunday drives through the country often are spent passing through tranquil areas with ducks swimming on blue-green ponds and cows grazing in rolling fields. While this placid scene is common throughout the country, it might very well take on a different meaning if the cows grazing in the fields were walking pharmaceutical factories, capable of producing pharmaceutical proteins.

The concept is not as far-fetched as one might imagine, especially if you know Mississippi State alumna Lannett Edwards ('92). Edwards grew up in Houston County, Tenn., where her grandparents owned a dairy farm. It was her time on the farm and her love for animals that shaped her future.

While she was in high school, Edwards participated in 4-H and was a member of the crop judging team. After graduation, she went to Austin Peay State University to study agriculture. At Austin Peay, she took a class in reproduction in farm animals taught by Dr. Gaines Hunt, who had earned a doctorate from MSU's College of Agriculture and Home Economics in 1971. It was in Hunt's class that she found the direction her career would follow.

"I really became interested in the subject when I took Dr. Hunt's repro class," explained Edwards. "I found that I loved the topic and it was his guidance that led me to pursue a master's degree at Mississippi State.

"At MSU, Dr. John Fuquay and Dr. Nancy Cox really helped me learn so many of the principles I needed for building a foundation necessary for a career in academics," said Edwards.

Edwards, who received her master's in dairy science from MSU and a doctorate from the University of Florida, is working to identify the importance of animal genes as they may be involved in reproduction, embryo development, or disease resistance.

A research assistant professor in the department of animal science at the University of Tennessee, Edwards became involved with the sometimes controversial topic of cloning after moving to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Beltsville, Md., facility to do post-doctoral work following graduation.

"I worked in the USDA's gene evaluation and mapping lab," said Edwards. "My supervisors, Dr. Caird Rexroad and Dr. Vernon Pursel, knew Dr. Ian Wilmut of Scotland, who had encouraged them to send someone over there to learn cloning procedures. He had been telling them that we should be able to use cloning to produce the transgenic livestock we wanted.

"I went to Scotland in the fall after Dolly, the first-ever clone of an adult sheep, was announced," said Edwards. "I was to learn the cloning procedures and get them up and running in our laboratory so we could use them as a tool to genetically modify livestock. Dr. Wilmut invited me to spend two months working with him and his colleagues in their lab at the Roslin Institute."

By arriving in Scotland when she did in 1966, Edwards stepped into the middle of the furor.

"I think everything sort of caught him by surprise initially because people had claimed that this was biologically impossible," she said. "All of the developmental biology textbooks and journals said so. Dolly caught us by surprise, as well as the rest of the world."

Edwards characterized Wilmut as a humble man, who loved science.

"He was a very busy man at the time I was there because at the time, 'Dollymania' had just broken out and he was inundated with requests," said Edwards. "His lab-oratory was the first to successfully clone an adult animal."

"Dolly's DNA originated from a mammary cell obtained from the udder of a Finn Dorset ewe," said Edwards. "This DNA was introduced into an egg in which the nuclear DNA had been removed. The resulting cloned embryo began to develop and ultimately was transferred into a Scottish Blackface ewe, which was Dolly's surrogate mother."

The sheep we know as Dolly is a clone of a six-year old ewe. And, while her birth rewrote the developmental biology texts and made scientists rethink positions on the subject of cloning, it was the announcement of a second clone-Polly-that was even more interesting because of the possibilities it presented.

"On the last day of my visit to Scotland, they announced the birth of Polly, who was the first transgenic-or genetically modified-sheep that was made using the cloning process," said Edwards. "She is a unique animal in the sense that the scientists inserted a gene that will be targeted to be expressed in the mammary glands, so when she begins to lactate, her milk should contain a human blood clotting factor."

Polly has shown that it is possible to genetically modify farm animals using cloning procedures for the purpose of producing non-traditional commodities.

"What attracts most people's attention is that genetically modified animals have the ability to produce pharmaceutical proteins," she explained. "Some of these proteins are available now to help treat human disease, but they cost several million dollars and the cost alone prohibits them from being available to the general public.

"So if we can get farm animals to produce these beneficial proteins, this would increase the availability of drugs in the future," she said. "They're like little pharmaceutical factories, and are often referred to as bioreactors."

The cloning process allows researchers to construct a cloned embryo by taking the DNA from a somatic (body) cell of the animal to be cloned and transferring it into an egg cytoplasm (an egg from which the nucleus has been removed) obtained from another animal like it. The egg cytoplasm will reprogram the nucleus of a somatic cell and make it perform as an early embryo.

The result is the formation of a one-cell cloned embryo that can begin to grow and develop. And, while the process does work, very few embryos will result in a live birth following their transfer into surrogate recipients.

"If you started with 100 cloned embryos containing only one cell, approximately 30 would be expected to develop in the laboratory over a seven-day period," Edwards explained. "If we transferred those 30 surviving cloned embryos into surrogate recipients, at best only 15-or about 50 percent-would be expected to establish a pregnancy.

"Based on what others are reporting, only about 25 percent of the cloned embryos successful in establishing a pregnancy will result in a live offspring," she continued. "So the overall efficiency of the cloning procedures ranges from 0.3 to 3 percent based on the number of embryos you start with, to the number of offspring you have on the ground at the end of the process.

"Dolly's announcement changed our way of thinking," she said. "Dolly demonstrated to researchers that is was not only possible to clone adult animals using somatic cells, but given the fact that somatic cells can be readily grown and genetically modified in the laboratory, the cloning procedures became ideal for genetically modifying farm animals. Using genetically modified somatic cells to produce cloned offspring will ensure that 100 percent of the resulting offspring will be genetically modified or have the gene of interest.

"Using cloning procedures to produce genetically modified farm animals is an incredible improvement over the traditional method of choice," she continued. "With that you can start out with 10,000 one-cell embryos that you micro-inject with DNA and in one study only seven of the 10,000 attempts had the gene that researchers were interested in studying. This method was inefficient and costly. At the time, it was estimated that it would cost $500,000 to produce a transgenic farm animal."

At Beltsville, Edwards was looking for alternative approaches to producing transgenic livestock, "so we could study things at the molecular level."

"Clearly, cloning procedures may offer an alternative approach for producing genetically modified farm animals," she said.

At UT, Edwards and her research team-which includes her husband Dr. Neal Schrick and Dr. Steve Oliver-are in the initial stages of their research.

"We have produced cloned embryos that have established pregnancies," Edwards said. "We hope to have our first calf on the ground late this summer. These first embryos that we have implanted are not genetically modified."

The research is new at UT, and this is Edwards' initial attempt to show potential funding agencies that she has a technique that will work.

And, the fact that the research is being done with dairy cows is important for two reasons.

"First, we want to see if we can identify specific genes that will help prevent certain diseases in dairy cattle," said Edwards. "To do so, we will use cloning procedures to genetically modify the cattle to determine the importance of a gene in conferring disease resistance to mastitis, an inflammation of the mammary gland that reduces the ability of a cow to produce milk."

A second goal is to find out why so many of the embryos that form die soon after conception.

"If we can begin to solve some of the problems and why embryos die, we can figure out ways to improve their overall chances of survival," said Edwards.

She said the team will use the cloning process as a tool to study the importance of genes during early embryo development.

Edwards said her husband is a vital member of the team.

"Essentially, what I do is make the clones," she said. "I collect the cells from the animals we want to clone with, do the cloning procedures, and grow them in the laboratory for a period of seven days.

"Neal's expertise is embryo transfer. He takes the cloned embryos that I have been growing in the lab and non-surgically transfers them into surrogate recipient animals," she explained. "We work incredibly well as a team because-without his level of expertise-I could produce all the embryos I wanted in the laboratory, but if I couldn't transfer them in the most optimum way, I wouldn't get pregnancies.

"Neal is experienced in ultrasonography and we are doing an ultrasound in every established pregnancy at two-week intervals so we can evaluate the pregnancy and determine the viability of the embryo," she said.

Using technology to create cloned animals has caused scientists, researchers, and many others to take a long, hard look at some very difficult ethical issues. One particular issue that stirs many emotions is whether scientists and researchers are playing God by tampering with natural reproduction processes.

"If you look back to when new technologies and processes became available that people didn't understand, in many instances you'll find there was an outcry against these technologies and processes," Edwards said.

She points to the in vitro fertilization process as a prime example.

"When people were first made aware of in vitro fertilization, there was an outcry about the process, but today it is a socially acceptable practice," Edwards said.

She does not think scientists are playing God by cloning farm animals, however.

"I think God has given us a brain to use and to exercise-to explore and to develop our knowledge pertaining to the processes of life-and that is what we are doing," she said. "I believe we are using tools that God gave us, but in my opinion, without Him there would be no creation."

She takes a totally different stand on the concept of cloning a human being.

"I find the idea of cloning humans totally repulsive," she said. "I can't think of any reason, other than selfish ones, why anyone would ever conceive of doing such a thing."

Edwards doesn't believe the idea of clones should be foreign to people.

"Some people will be forever against the idea of using cloning procedures for the betterment of mankind, but, if you think about it, the idea of cloning is not new because identical twins are nature's truest form of a clone."