Nature reports the French Institute for Agronomy Research has announced the first successful cloning of rats. I'm sorry but isn't part of the pest problem that we have because rats are so good a reproducing themselves naturally. You can just imagine the way the planning session went.

"hmmm what can we spend our research dollars on? Hey why don't we clone an animal that we have far too many of anyway."

Only joking, it may seem silly but having genetically identical rats eliminates one very important variable when carrying out research into illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer. Having genetically identical rats enables us to test the efficacy of treatments and know that any benefit was not just because one rat was genetically more robust than another.