UH-cloned mouse gets new home at national museum

The taxidermy remains of “the most celebrated mouse in scientific history” — a rodent cloned by University of Hawaii researchers in 1997 — has a new home at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Cumulina was created in a lab using the “Honolulu Technique” developed by an international team led by reproductive biologist Ryuzo Yanagi­machi at the UH John A. Burns School of Medicine, according to a UH news release. The female mouse was the first cloned from an adult somatic (nonreproductive) cell. She was named for the cumulus cells whose nuclei were used to clone her.

Yanagimachi, whose previous research helped lay the groundwork for in vitro fertilization in the early 1960s, retired in 2005 but remains an active researcher at UH Manoa’s Institute for Biogenesis Research, which he founded, the release said.

According to UH, “Cumulina was the first mammal to be cloned more than once and for several generations. In fact, the Yanagimachi Laboratory produced more than 50 carbon-copy mice using what was thought to be a more reliable cloning technique than the one used to create Dolly the Sheep. The clear reproducibility of the Honolulu Technique for cloning mammals convinced the world that cloning was real.”

Cumulina lived to “a ripe age of 31 months, equivalent to age 95 in human years,” the release said. She died of natural causes in 2000 and was kept at the Institute for Biogenesis Research, part of JABSOM, until donated to the Smithsonian museum.

“I view Cumulina as being an ambassador to the world for the biomedical research that’s done at the University of Hawai‘i. … The discovery that a mouse could be cloned over and over again happened here before it happened anywhere else in the world,” said W. Steven Ward, director of the IBR and a JABSOM professor, in the release.

“The fact that the Smithsonian Institute so eagerly accepted this gift is confirmation of the place in history that the discovery has. We are thrilled that the University of Hawaii will now be recognized in the nation’s flagship history museum as having made a major discovery in biomedical science.”

Along with Cumulina, the museum acquired a sheet of paper with footprints made by the mouse on her second birthday.

“This tiny mouse will help our audiences explore complex topics, from the science of making copies of organisms to the ethics of doing so,” said National Museum of American History Curator Kristen Frederick-Frost in the release. “When Cumulina was born, people wondered what, or who, was next. We still wonder. She is a part of the past that pushes us to consider the possibilities of the future.”

Cumulina won’t be on display yet, but will be featured in the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine. In the meantime the mouse will be preserved in the museum’s Medicine and Science Division.