M A I N   N E W S

Setback for Left Front in civic poll

CALCUTTA, June 28 (UNI) — The ruling Left Front lost the Calcutta Municipal Corporation elections and was fighting neck-and-neck with the Trinamool Congress for the Bidhan Nagar municipality.

City Mayor Prasanta Chatterjee (CPM) lost the election, held on Sunday last, while Trinamool Congress candidate Surbrata Mukherjee won.

Official sources said the Left Front bagged 62 seats, while the Trinamool Congress won 64. The Congress managed 12 seats and the BJP three.

Though the results indicate a hung municipal corporation, it is learnt that the Trinamool Congress and the BJP would form the board with the support of the Congress members.

Besides, Mr Mukherjee, other notable winners included Congress leader Paresh Pal.

In the Bidhan Nagar municipality, the Left Front and the Trinamool Congress captured 11 seats each. Counting has been suspended in one ward owing to defect in the electronic voting machine.

The Bidhan Nagar municipality has 23 wards.

New cloning method devised

PARIS, June 28 (AFP) — The creators of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal, have devised a revolutionary method of gene splicing that could lead to tailor-made animals, the British science weekly Nature reports. Two female lambs, called Diana and Cupid, have been cloned from sheep DNA that has been altered to contain specific changes, it says.

The work — likely to fan a fierce ethical debate about genetic modification of animals — was carried out by a team led by Alexander Kind at PPL Therapeutics Ltd., based in Edinburgh, Scotland. At present, inserting genes into mammals, with the goal for instance of getting the animal to produce proteins that can be used in medical research, is a relatively simple affair but with hit-and-miss results.

It entails putting DNA into the nucleus of a fertilised egg. The transplanted material sometimes lands on a different spot on the chromosome and does not interact with the targeted genes, thus failing to produce the desired protein.