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"Normal-looking offspring were obtained from all four strains tested."
Link from article http://www.biolreprod.org/content/early/2013/06/25/biolreprod.113.110098.abstract)

One scary a$$ line, indicates a 100% success rate.

You should re-read the abstract to see what it is really saying.

The end result is that they were able to get normal-looking offspring from all four strains tested. However, there was an excessive number of failures in the process in order to get that process. The important line over-looked indicating what it took to get those end results: "cloned offspring were born at a 2.8% birth rate". If you check table 1 of the full article it shows there were a total of 651 embryos cultured in order to get their end results.

This is very far from a 100% success rate.

We have a different view of what constitutes 100%. Yes they started with randomly selected leukocyte nuclei but through the sorting and discarding
those known to give poor results, they ended with four strains which normal-looking offspring were obtained from all four strains tested.

I didn't count the ones discarded, as it's part of the cleansing process.

"Normal-looking offspring were obtained from all four strains tested."
Link from article http://www.biolreprod.org/content/early/2013/06/25/biolreprod.113.110098.abstract)

One scary a$$ line, indicates a 100% success rate.

The ramifications of what's implied are numerous and cover every aspect of our future.

Really? Who, other than a slashdotter, would be excited to be set up with a "normal-looking" date?

"Normal-looking offspring were obtained from all four strains tested."
Link from article http://www.biolreprod.org/content/early/2013/06/25/biolreprod.113.110098.abstract)

One scary a$$ line, indicates a 100% success rate.

You should re-read the abstract to see what it is really saying.

The end result is that they were able to get normal-looking offspring from all four strains tested. However, there was an excessive number of failures in the process in order to get that process. The important line over-looked indicating what it took to get those end results: "cloned offspring were born at a 2.8% birth rate". If you check table 1 of the full article it shows there were a total of 651 embryos cultured in order to get their end results.

This is very far from a 100% success rate.

The aim of the experiment was to see if a clone could be produced from more commonly available cell types. This was a desirable aim due to the fact that it would be less harmful (and/or painful) to the donor than other methods of harvesting material for cloning (which may result in permanent damage or death to the donor).

The viability rate for this method of cloning is still no greater than any other method of cloning in use. It's simply a more humane/ethical method of cloning, nothing greater.

"Normal-looking offspring were obtained from all four strains tested."
Link from article http://www.biolreprod.org/content/early/2013/06/25/biolreprod.113.110098.abstract)

One scary a$$ line, indicates a 100% success rate.

The ramifications of what's implied are numerous and cover every aspect of our future.

Even if their neural interfaces are a bit out there. We've been growing humanized mice for years. I wonder if all they really needed to do, however, was to generate a chimera by seeding an embryo with a human nervous system before the immune system starts to develop. We've learned quite a bit about developmental biology from avian chimeras, mammalian chimeras are a bit more challenging but can be achieved.

There's no reason to think this was a hoax. Just because some other korean researcher committed fraud doesn't mean that *this* guy did.

No, not because some researcher who happened to be from the same country made one.
Because fluorescent cats obviously look silly (and thus make very good prank material), and don't make really sense from a scientific point of view :
- They are seldom used in research nowadays (for the reasons I said before : it's cheaper to work with smaller mammals or even simplier subjects if you don't need mamals)
- Cloning cats has already been done.
- The only new thing is having cloned cats *with* a mutation, for which, as I said, I fail to see advantages that aren't offered already by cloned genetically engineered mice (with the added bonus of being easier and faster to breed).

- This is not Nature, this is the "Bizness" section of Korea Times.

Also for the finer details :
- As far as I know, cat fur doesn't tend to glow green in ultra violet light (in fact, for what I know, most animal furs don't glow in UV light which is handy to help diagnosing fungi-infections which DO glow in UV light. Also known as "Wood's lamp test" in Dermatology).
Thus, this image may be photoshoped by TFA's author as a prank and not pulled out of a real scientific paper.
- Angora species wouldn't have been the best species to show of body fluorescence (because of the thick fur blocking the light)

That's why I initially suspected that TFA may be a prank.

But then, some googling around revealed that there was actually a paper published in Biology of Evolution.
So this maybe isn't a prank, after all.

Also, your argument about it being hard to clone animals "higher up on the evolutionary tree" is just silly. The first animals to be cloned were *sheep*. Don't you remember? It wasn't *that* many years ago...

Dolly was the first cloned *mammal*.
Other species have been cloned before that.

When going "higher up on the evolutionary" we start to see appearing a lot of peculiar modification on the DNA : epigenetic modification. That's information not contained inside the sequence, but additional modification made to the DNA molecule. It differs a lot between somatic cells and germ-line cells. As a matter of fact, they even differ between genetic material you received from your mother and genetic material you received from your father. Also somatic cell may have accumulated some damage and mutation (that's why there are mechanisms such as telomers to keep count of division cycles and may be part of the explanation of why somatic cells don't divide much).
Thus, when cloning mammals you're starting with very poor quality material.

As a result, the yields aren't very good :
- With dolly, 277 eggs were used to create 29 embryos. Three lambs where born, only Dolly survived.
- With the fluo-cat : 176 embryo were implanted in 11 surrogate mothers. Only 3 successful pregnancies, with only 2 live kitten at arrival.

In comparison, frogs are much more easy to clone (probably because one may find nice undifferentiated cells in their body to get clean material for cloning)

Mice are also known to have higher success rate (Dolly was around ~0.3%. First mouse cloning experiment encountered ~2% success rate), probably because of slightly less DNA modification hampering the cloning procedure.

Also mice have another big advantage above cats in cloning :
- once you got at least a couple of cloned mice, it's then very easy to produce a huge amount of this peculiar strain of mice, simply by controlled selective breeding of you clones, because mice are quickly fertile and reproduce very quickly.

There's actually no reason that no humans have been cloned except for ethical concerns (or