Game of clones

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:06Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Marnie Chasterton. This episode comes from Argentina, where an obsession with the perfect polo horse is driving scientific innovation.

1:30It's polo time. I am watching the world's most prestigious polo tournament in the centre of Buenos Aires. What's extraordinary about this scene is that some of the horses playing on the pitch in front of me are identical. Not similar, identical. They're clones. I'm Marnie Chesterton. This is Game of Clones. The story of how Argentina, a nation obsessed with polo, became the epicentre of cloning, and in doing so, not only fundamentally transformed one of the world's oldest sports, but pushed the frontiers of science.

2:14Polo, which originated in Central Asia, was brought to Argentina by British immigrants. He founded the first polo club here, in Buenos Aires, in 1882. If you don't know this game, it's a bit like hockey, but crucially played on horseback, where two teams of four people use long mallets to drive a ball past goalposts. There's one at either end of this pitch, and a great horse can make all the difference to the final score. The twists and turns of this game are not immediately obvious, so I've brought an insider to help explain what's going on in front of me. My name is José Santamarina. My nickname is Pepe.

2:55I'm the vice president of the Hurling and Polo Club here in Argentina. I'm a former five-goal polo player and agriculture engineer, and polo has been on my life and on my family for now five generations. It's a lifestyle. It's an obsession. Yes, yes, yes. It's an addiction, I would say. But very expensive.

3:22But just how did this sport end up so entwined with cloning? Basics first. Cloning is a process of creating genetically identical copies. Back in 1996, an animal was cloned for the first time. She was a sheep called Dolly. It was a huge scientific breakthrough and very controversial. The process was very inefficient. It rarely led to live births, and often the animals that were born were born sickly. Nobody would have thought of using it commercially to, for example, produce the best horses in the polo world. Time to introduce an Argentine celebrity. If I say Adolfo Cambiasso to you, what would you say?

4:08Adolfo Cambiasso is the best player in the world. A legend. I really don't think there are any words to describe him. Maybe absolutely legendary, uncomparable, one of a kind. Very good looking in his old age. His old age! Adolfo Cambiasso is one of the best players ever in the country. If you could sum him up in one sentence, what would it be? Genius. Adolfo Cambiasso is the king of polo. He's 50 years old, he's dominated this sport for 30 years, but he's also, as you'll hear, a pioneer in cloning. My host Pepe and I are watching him play at the Argentine Open today and, to no one's surprise, he's winning.

4:55In La Natividad we are watching the best, maybe the best player of the history of the game that is Adolfo Cambiasso, that he's playing with his sons and with his nephews. So who's going to win? Cambiasso, for sure. For sure. association. That's Cambiasso. So, there he is. Scored. Polo is played in short chunks of time, called chuckers. Each chucker has seven minutes of net play. You're going to see that they're going to switch and they're going to change horses in every chucker, sometimes between three or four times. And how many chuckers in a game? Eight chuckers. Here, it's only in Argentina they play eight chuckers.

5:40In the UK, six seconds. They run between 65 to 70 kilometres per hour, and they hit that, it's a billiard ball, so imagine how difficult it is to, and of course on top of an animal that weighs 500 kilos, so it's a really dangerous sport. You're going to see that at the end of the field, each player has a spare horse on each side of the field. You see, there, there. So now, for example, that they can stop, now they change horses, even though they're not going to wait, but they quickly change horses. And why? Why do they change horses? They change because they use them only two minutes in order for them to recover.

6:29Each player brings around 10 to 12 horses per game. Each player gets 10 to 12 horses. So imagine that you have here eight players. At least you have between 80 to 100 horses here in the pony lines.

6:52So you need your horse to be good, but also with so many changes, a rider wants each different horse to be brilliant in the same ways as the last one. Almost as much of a celebrity as Adolfo Gambiasso, and definitely a key player in this story, is one of his horses, a mare named Cuataterra. Cuataterra has been described as the best polo horse in history. The strongest rider plus the best horse is a winning combination. What if there were multiple identical best horses? On the outskirts of Buenos Aires is a place called Pilar, a hub for polo. There are many polo clubs and polo players that live around here.

7:40It's also home to Kieron Labs, where I'm going to see how to clone a horse.

7:49Well, my name is Florencia Iriarte. So my name is Belen, I'm biotechnologist. we are now in the part of cloning and embryo lab. Talk me through how you clone a horse. Where do you start? So you need two important things the gene that you want to clone and you need the oocyte. Where does the oocyte, the egg, come from? Well, we used to work with slaughterhouses where they used to kill animals for their meat and so on. So we used to ask for ovaries from there and we collect the oocyte from that ovaries. Argentina is one of the largest exporters of horse meat, so there are a plentiful supply of horse ovaries and eggs as a by-product.

8:48Cloning labs like Kieron use the eggs but swap out the genetic material in them for the DNA from the horses they want to clone. So all of this is sounding a lot like IVF. Is it a bit similar? Yes, it's very similar. In IVF, they use the sperm. We don't use sperm. We use only the cell donor, the donor cell and the oocyte. It's a delicate operation and I'm shown the tools. So this is the heart of the lab, the embryo lab. Here we have the inverted microscopes. So this is the beating heart of taking DNA out of the egg and then inserting the DNA that you want. That's right, yes. And you can see the two very, very fine needles that are under the microscope lens that are where you do it.

9:45Can I ask how successful this is compared to putting a stallion and a mare in a field and kind of letting them get on with it? It's not that successful, but we have to make a high number of embryos in order to achieve a certain number of pregnancies. So it's difficult. I mean, we speculate that we have 50 embryos and only 25 are going to get pregnant. And then from that 25, only the half will be born. But the ones that are born are healthy? Yes, healthy. Yes, they don't have problems. Yes, the process has been optimised. Kieron is owned by Daniel Sammartino, a businessman whose idea of retirement is running multiple startups.

10:52As we sit in his back garden in Pilar, he explains that he has a couple of vineyards, a pharmaceutical company. I also have companies in biotech like Kieron, but also genetics. I also breed polo horses. Everything I do has to have a relationship with innovation. I've come to meet Daniel to get some insights into how and why cloning has taken off in Argentina's polo scene. Well, it's a long and interesting story. There was a very good friend of mine, Adolfo Gambiasso, who is the number one polo player in the world, and he's a pioneer. He was the one who first decided to clone, and he cloned his most famous and probably the best mare in the world, Cuartetera.

11:45He decided to clone that several years ago in the US. No one was cloning here in Argentina at that time. And I thought it was a bold bet. He believed it was going to work. And at the beginning, nobody believed that that was going to work. So the greatest rider, Cambiasso, partnered with a Texan called Alan Mika and together made a plan to try and clone some of Cambiasso's best horses. And as you heard, most of the polo world thought that it was a risky move, a waste of time and money. But traditional horse breeding is also a gamble. Even if you breed your best mares with top stallions, you can't predict how the genetic cards will fall.

12:36Two amazing parents might give you an ordinary foal and you won't know for years. And during those years, you have to feed your horse, stable your horse and teach it polo. It takes years to train a horse in the essential polo skills, responding to your leg signals, taking sharp corners and stopping fast from 30 miles an hour without getting hurt. The grooms, the trainers, the vet bills, it's tens of thousands of dollars every year. And finally, a five-year-old pony is ready for its first polo match. Only then do you find out if this horse has got what it takes to be as good as the legendary Quatertera.

13:19So what if science could just give you another Quatertera? But as Daniel discovered, back when he started a cloning business, many breeders were sceptical that this technology would produce the goods. At the beginning, Cairon was having difficult times because first it was difficult to clone in large scale. The method, the technology, the first year we made one clone, just one clone. So difficulty in production. Secondly, difficulty in selling. As I was saying before, no one wanted to buy or make clones. So I had to make a decision. I either closed the company or doubled the bet. and I decided to double the bet.

14:03I went and visited some of these players and our breeders who didn't believe and I made a proposal. I said, what if I clone for you for free and without condition? We make two clones, it's one for you and one for me. And we make four, we make two for you and two for me and so on and so forth. And I convinced like 25 people of doing this. So for several years I transformed the expenses of the lab into equity, into building my own breed of polo ponies, famous ponies. That created two things. One, I created the volume to the lab to solve the bottlenecks or solve the production problems. With volume came productivity.

14:51With productivity came breakthroughs. With breakthroughs came more progress and so more pregnancies and more production. You can see how the field is developing, but cloned horses still had to prove themselves. Creating a clone was only the beginning. The real question was, is having the same genetic makeup as a great horse enough to make another great horse? Would the clones perform? Over at the spiritual home of Polo, Pepe Santa Marina picks up the story. We are at the Hullingham Club. This is a club that was founded in 1888. It was a huge and important part of the history of Argentinian polo because here is where everything started.

15:39This is a good place to ask you, in the home of polo, about a significant change in the game of polo. Tell me how Cambiasso started cloning. Cambiasso, not only he's the best player of the history of the game, but also as an entrepreneur, as a businessman. Cuartetera is the name of the very most famous horse in Cambiasso's history. And he had this crazy idea of just playing a game with only cuarteteras. And this at the very beginning sounded crazy, almost impossible. But well, after different tries, he managed to get like 11 cuarteteras and nine of them were extremely good. So he, after seven years of this crazy idea, he managed to have them all these cuarteteras in one game, playing a really very competitive polo.

16:42The crucial match is 2016. Tell me about this game. Of course we had lots of doubts because nevertheless you have to think that even though the animal has the same genetic material, playing polo is not just a question of your natural abilities. You need to learn a lot of things. So there were many, many doubts about the performance of these horses. That day we realized that all these crazy thoughts, they became real. He was using six cuarteteras and he was playing seven chakras with, actually in terms of genetic, the same animal. It was absolutely fantastic. So, a decade ago, in the final of the most prestigious polo tournament, came Cambiasso's chance to prove the clones were worth the cost and effort.

17:41And over the course of seven chakras, Cambiasso rides six horses, each with an identical splash of white on their dark brown foreheads. Quaterteros one, two, three, four, five and six. This is where the tactical advantage of identical horses comes in. Riders change horse every few minutes. Each animal has a different temperament, different strengths. Cambiasso's clones eliminated some of those variables. He'd bred six versions of perfection. In the final chucker, Cambiasso and Quaterra No. 6 smash the ball towards the north goal, where his teammate knocks it home. Goal! It's yet another win for Cambiasso.

18:28But it's a conclusive win for cloning. The world of polo is convinced, and everyone wants in. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. This advertisement feature is paid and presented by Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Looking for the perfect place to grow your business? For over 30 years, Poland has been a launchpad for innovation at the heart of Europe, powered by world-class research and ambitious young talent. From bold startups to established powerhouses, Poland offers the momentum, resources and reliability you need to take your business further. Poland, where businesses don't just grow, they're built to last.

19:07Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:43This advertisement feature is paid and presented by Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Got a big idea? Then you need the right destination to make it happen. Welcome to Poland, Europe's launchpad for startups. My name is Rosalia Urbanek, Chief Investment Officer at PFR Ventures. We invest in innovation, and there is so much to be found in Poland. Poland is somewhere you can accelerate your business with unrivaled higher educated talent, which is everywhere. From engineers and designers to marketers and innovators, Poland is home to one of the youngest, most ambitious workforces in Europe, ready to help turn your vision into a business that scales.

20:28We invested in more than 90 funds, which finance growth of more than 900 companies in Poland. with competitive costs, a buzzing innovation scene and access to 38 million consumers right at your doorstep. Poland gives you the space and the business support to grow faster.

20:50So if you're ready to take your startup to the next level, choose Poland, where bold ideas become global success stories.

21:14Back at the Argentine Open, I'm watching Cambiasso drive home another success on the field. But what about his successes off the field? What began as one man's quest to immortalise his champion horses has become a multi-million dollar industry. There have been lawsuits and fallouts because, as cloning becomes commonplace, a prize horse's DNA is hot property. If you sell a clone, the new owner can make dozens more. So Cambiasso's Quater Terra, for example, has a genome that's as guarded as a family heirloom. But cloning is just the beginning. How far do polo fans want to go in pursuit of the perfect horse?

21:59In 2024, scientists at Chiron announced something even more controversial. The world's first genetically edited horses using CRISPR technology. Five foals were born with modified speed genes. Over at Chiron Biotech, biologist Juan explains what they did. My name is Juan Ignacio Bastón. I'm a molecular biologist and I have been working eight years here in the molecular biology lab of Cairo. Here is where we did the shin editing projects. The muscle fibers type one are present in horses that have more resistance, horses that run in long distance or endurance competitions. and the fibers type 2 give to the horses more speed in a short distance, more sprint.

22:57Okay, so more like Usain Bolt. Yes, so we did here is to transform horses with fibers type 1 in horses with fiber type 2 with more sprint because that is a trait, a characteristic, very appreciated in the polo game. And the horses were born, right, that have been genetically edited? Yes, the horses were born last year. But they're still very young horses. Yes. You won't know for years whether they are the most amazing polo horses in the world. For that, it's obviously that we have to wait because they are very young. And this is just kind of taking a natural variation, right? You're not taking a gene that wouldn't normally exist in a horse.

23:50This is present in the species, just not in the parents that have the other good characteristics. It's not present in the parent line, but it's present in other individuals of the same population of horses. It's not a new characteristic for the species. Nevertheless, it's a modification technique that's currently not allowed. Do you think that by the time these horses are ready to play polo, that this genome editing would be acceptable? This is my personal opinion, of course. I think that with the time, these horses will be allowed to play polo. All new technologies have a little bit of resistance.

24:33when you introduce it as something new, which is logical because many people don't know what is, what is the implication for the future, for the breed. So this animal, for the moment, will be put in a revision panel and eventually, if all right, will be accepted to pay pro. So this could be the next generation of improvements for ponies in the game of polo? Yes, that is the idea and I think that that will happen. About an hour outside of downtown Buenos Aires and Palermo's polo fields, down some red dirt road, is Los Indios stables. Hola, buenas. I've come to see Santiago Balasta. former president and current vice president of the Argentine Polo Pony Breeders Association, an outfit set up 40 years ago to oversee standards in horse breeding.

25:37They've embraced cloning in the past, so how do they feel about the latest developments in genetically engineered ponies?

25:50It's amazing how much change has happened in the last 40 years, in the last 20 years with the progress in the quality of horses that Argentina produces. What we want is to have a better polo horse and thanks to these reproductive techniques there are these tools that are used to accelerate generation times. Therefore each generation is of higher genetic quality and each one becomes a better polo horse. Today the first genetically edited horses born are only two months old. We don't yet know if the impact that they will have is better or worse compared to the original non-genetically edited horse.

26:33Colloquially, there's still no rule, nothing. No editado geneticamente, con lo cual todavía no hay ninguna regla, no hay nada.

26:48In the sport of polo, cloning has gone from band to an established technique. Will genetic engineering go the same way? Well, currently the sport's national body and breeding association are putting up hurdles to prevent genetically engineered horses from joining the game. More than 50 breeders signed a letter saying that gene-edited horses were crossing a line. But concerns seemed less focused on the ethics of engineering your way to the ultimate horse and more worried that this might make a world where science threatens the enviable bloodlines traditional breeders have created over many generations.

27:29so how hopeful is Daniel Sammartino that his gene edited horses will one day play polo we call it precision precision breeding progress and this is a horse that you can find in nature by natural crossing and as such we've got the authorization to release to have the horses and the horses are enjoying now the farm freely so that's the current status do you think they're going to be incorporated into the game of polo in the future? They're not at the moment, am I right? That's my hope. That's my hope and that's why we did it. We did it because we thought it's the future. There's two potential outcomes I can see.