Cloning scientist leaves UI

MOSCOW, Idaho – Gordon Woods, the University of Idaho veterinary scientist who helped create the world’s first cloned mules, has left the school to take a job at Colorado State University.

In 2003, Woods, veterinary scientist Dirk Vanderwall and a University of Idaho research team, cloned Idaho Gem. The mule clone went on to success on the mule racing circuit in Nevada and California.

Woods and Vanderwall cloned several mules after Idaho Gem.

This semester, Colorado State named Woods the director of its Equine Reproduction Lab. He will make $135,000 in Colorado. He made about $100,000 per year in Idaho.

“The equine reproduction laboratory at Colorado State is pre-eminent,” Woods, 54, said by phone Friday from his new office on the Fort Collins, Colo., campus. “It has been historically, and is today, considered one of the top programs in the world.”

Woods told the Lewiston Tribune that his partner Vanderwall was stellar, but Colorado State offered a whole team of top scientists.

“There’s only one Dirk Vanderwall in the world,” he said. “But here I’ve got 10 people that are closely comparable to him.”

Colorado State is close to the Denver Medical Center, which will give Woods a partnership to work toward his goal of researching human diseases using horse models.

Woods graduated from Lewiston High School and the University of Idaho. After working at the nation’s top veterinary college at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., he moved back to Idaho.

He said his decision to leave was partly motivated by the state’s relatively small contribution of tax dollars to equine and other university research projects.

“As much as I, being a hometown boy, wanted to live in Idaho, we had a hope that if our performance was at a certain level that we could change the prioritization of horse reproduction,” Woods said. “And it just never happened.”

University of Idaho Provost Doug Baker said Woods’ departure is part of a larger, statewide problem.

Idaho universities cannot offer competitive salaries to top scholars and scientists, he said.

“The longer you’re in the state without pay raises, the more the market separates from you,” said Baker.