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Monkey Cloning. Sort Of.
A whole slew of people have written about the announcement
from scientists that they have "cloned" monkeys. Actually, in yet another case of bad science coverage (See my rant earlier today), they split an early-stage embryo. So, they really made artificial twins, which they then re-implanted into the mother. Still a heckuva a ways away from actually doing any sort of real cloning, IMHO.
cool. Now all we need is an assembly line doing this sort of shit and we can get that complete works of shakespeare going....
or double the IQ of texas or something...
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Which in turn shows a measure of my own stupidity. There. I've said it. The rest of y'all can sit it out while I eat the crow. (Mm.. tastes like chicken.) I saw a headline, and thought the article reflected it. Pass the ketchup.
The reason I'm stepping forward is to start this discussion: how can a techie community browbeat the media into reporting with a clue? It's frightening to see how the media mislead the general populace so damn stupidly and see the techie sector utterly unable to do anything about it.
We've just made it out of the Y2K scare, and we're moving on the the usual fare (internet porn, et cetera, et cetera).
It's also sad to see how many scientists and engineers agree with the phrase "I'm not superstitious in general, but I believe reporters are bad luck."
*sigh*
It's not cloning by a long shot, but creating identical twins on demand has huge benefits.
For one, you can create a significant population for a 'nature vs. nurture' study.
Two, with an identical genetic baseline, all with a specific genetic defect, you can do comparative studies of different treatments. Since treatment on the genetic level is likely to be affected by the genetics of the individual being treated, a 'same' baseline allows for much more reasonable studies of treatment effectiveness.
Three, again a common genetic foundation in animals engineered to produce a hormone, or grow organs or whatever have you, is going to result in a much more consistent product. And Animal Farm (heh) can essencially be a mass-production assembly line, with little or no variance in the 'components'.
You can tweak a brood of embryos, analyse the yield, terminate those that are not desirable for your needs, and 'twin' the ones that are. No need to repeat the original impregnation and creation of life - since nature will do that for you. You just pick the good 'fruit' and reproduce it on an assembly line.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Okay, despite the fact that this seemingly trivial article was blown way out of proportion by the word "cloning," I can see where this is newsworthy. I mean, if what the scientists say is true and this is the first time that we have been able to create a genetically identical population of rhesus monkeys, then I could see why the scientific community might be excited. Despite the fact that they can probably only get a limited number of offspring from any given zygote. I see this as news not because of the technical achievement but because of the research that it makes possible...if the same could be done with humans then the whole nature/nurture argument could be closed for good in many instances. Depending on how close these monkeys are, this development could end many of the same arguments.
Invicta{HOG}
>Seriously though, has any noticed that the news reports more and more non-news day in and day out? the
/. news icons into a great big furnace. A guy runs in yelling "I don't know how it happened, but the bins are EMPTY!" The Chief Engineer panics "Aww crap. Quick, get the cloned monkey droppings."
> side effects of 24hr cable news channels maybe? ah well...
Somewhere, I imagine a room that looks like the engine room of a steamship. Lots of grimy people with hats that have a card labeled "Press" shovel lumps of coal in the shape of
Or at least that's what pops into my head whilst avoiding doing any real work.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Did anyone notice the remark that they named it "Tetra" meaning "One of four?" Sounds like a borg monkey name.
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In a sense, splitting an embryo IS cloning. In Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", this is exactly what's done (plus some other ethically very questionable things) to produce workers (gammas, deltas and epsilons) while higher caste embryos were left unsplitted.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Clones are twins. And twins are clones. I understand that you'll reserve the term "clone" until I can take a clipping from your fingernails and grow a Hemos Mark II inside a bubbling vat, but in my opinion it's pretty important not to make this false clone/twin distinction.
:-) then we know what will result. We've all read the sci-fi: sex slaves, war drones, and second class status.
The reason is that, if we continue to think of a clone as different from a twin in some vague, undefinable way, then we are sure to treat clones as less than human if ever the technology becomes widespread.
People are often arrogant about the things they create. If we allow ourselves to be deceived in considering clones "our creatures" rather than as human twins achieved at a rather late date
Yes it would be stupid! Surely the origin of a genetic duplicate is irrelevant when determing the intrinsic worth or rights of the duplicate. But somehow I fear that logic wouldn't play a very large role in the decision.
We have a chance to forstall all this if we try to change our thinking now, before clones are walking down the street alongside us.
Clones = Twins
Twins = Clones
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Too many reporters and media companies are not just clueless, but they don't care.
It's going to take a bit more.
My cell biology text says that a clone is "a population of organisms derived from a single ancestor and therefore homogeneous." Which is to say, a population in which all individuals have no genetic difference.
Cloning doesn't require that the original cells not be eggs. It is certainly true that the achievement is minor, since it imitates normal biological events that occur when producing identical twins.
What made Dolly neat was that they made a clone from a cell that had differentiated and was therefore in theory incapable of producing anything other than udder cells. Dolly is no more or less a clone than this monkey, and I bet that more monkeys survive this kind of cloning than would if they cloned skin cells.
Since so many monkeys are endangered, it isn't surprising that they want to be able to clone them, and this is cheaper and easier than what they did for Dolly.
Yes! This is great! We are one step closer to genetically engineering a race of super-monkeys to serve us. No longer will the disabled be the only ones to get cute little monkeys to do all their daily chores for them. Just think, monkeys smart enough to serve us in ways they are incapable of now, but not smart enough to rise up against us. I can't wait until the day when I come home from work and there are monkeys mowing the lawn, cooking dinner, etc. God bless the US of A!
-
"If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution."
On Cloning:
Science is an evolutionary thing. Every step has to be proceeded by the step before. Consider this oversimplified example: In order to put your computer on your desk, two major lines of scientific research had to be done. First, we had to really understand how electricity worked(not just discover its existence)Thank you Nicola Tesla. Second, we had to discover how to actually make a computer, which we can thank many people, but the one that comes to mind right now is Madam Currie. THEN we had to figure out how to make the two sciences compatible.
My point is these are all baby steps getting the scientists closer to the end goal, actual cloning.
On Media:
The media is very much like a snake with its head cut off. It lashes out at anything it senses, and has no concept of what it is doing.
Take for instance the story ran just yesterday about DeCSS and its "piracy" software, versus the "Good Guys," the DVD industry. CNN makes me wretch. By the way, the hearing is tomorrow(today, my time.) Big turnout, please! Nothing would make me happier than Open Source supporters standing in the streets because the entire courthouse was chock full. Anyone who can, go support the cause.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
"In 1993 Dr. Jerry Hall said he had cloned human embryos by splitting them, although he said the clones were destroyed."
He destroyed the clones?? At what point in the lifecycle, I wonder. It seems to me this would have been a huge deal-even if the clones weren't born yet. The pro-lifers would have had a cow. So how come I've never heard of it? They mentioned it so casually here.
Lisa
www.grrl.org
Actually, researchers generally do a really good job of making things humane. There are a few that do not, but I think most researches would try and keep their animals from going to the places which are nasty. The point being if those protestors could just go to the researchers nicely and get commitments that the animals will only be sent to places with good conditions when theywere done with them, i.e. a black list of bad orginisations would be far more effective then those protesting loons could ever dream of being.
The protests are especially silly when you realize that the beef industry is probable far more crule then any primate researcher. Who knows maybe all those protestors are vegans.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
But the article was right! Maybe unintentionally, but right all the same.
The geek readership here have read so much about current cloning practises that many of the non-Biologists among us have wrongly assumed that "cloning"=="nuclear substitution". That assumption is false. In Biology, a "clone" simply means a group of genetically identical siblings. So any viable offspring resulting from a single embryo count as a "clone". This includes natural-born human monozygotic twins, parthenogenetically created batch of greenfly larvae from the same mother, and monkeys grown from the same dissected embryo in a lab experiment.
All the ranting about bad journalism is not in fact justified on this occasion - and you shouldn't be eating your words.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Earlier this month the New York Times (it's not online anymore) and the Washington Post reported that researchers in Connecticut and Japan cloned six calves from skin cells taken from the ear of a bull and stored for months in the lab. A long ways away from cloning?! The interesting points are that they used skin cells, from a male, and stored them for a long period of time.
There are several steps to go before this technology can be truly useful
Here is what I would do if I were in charge of the program :
This only provides the raw material though - sort of like a hard disk factory that pumps out 20 GB drives at a rate of 100 per hour.
What we need to research is the ability to create clones that retain a pre-programmed memory. This way, we can run off a batch of clones that make up a ship's crew - Commander, Engineer, Navigator, Comms Officer, etc. The crew would have a useful lifespan, for operating the ship whilst the next batch of clones was growing in the tank.
On graduation day, when the next batch of clones matures to age 21, and the generation following them are confirmed to have passed their initial tests, the older redundant crew perform 'The Graduation Ceremony' :
This effectively solves the very-long-space-flight problem.
There's always one of me just-a hangin' arou-hound.
Animals fall into two broad classes, deuterostomes and protostomes. For protostomes, the mouth forms before the anus. Starfish, jellyfish and insects and protostomes. In deuterostome development, the anus forms first. Vertebrates are among the deuterostomes. The early cleavage of protostomes is spiral. For deuterostomes, it is radial.
If one removes cells from a protostome blastula after the first few divisions, a deformed, partial organism will develop. Cell differentiation starts early. Deuterostomes differentiate later. An animal can develop normally after removing a few cells from a blastula even after the first few divisions.
Once cells begin differentiating, it is hard to clone them. Dolly was such a feat because the managed to reset that cell differentiation clock removing the DNA from a zygote, putting in the parent's DNA and doing some chemical magic.
This feat was accomplished with a mouse a long time ago. I saw it on Nova. Those researchers also fused two separate, very tiny embryos. One embryo was from a line of white mice; the other from a line of black mice. They got a mouse with patches of both colors.
Splitting a tiny embryo to make several embryos is an accomplishment. The work is difficult and delicate. Even though cell differentiation begins later in deuterostomes, I imagine it is still challenging to get the cells to survive and then to grow normally.
Cloning usually means making a genetically identical copy. It comes from the Greek word for twig in reference to the horticultural practice of cutting and grafting small twigs to make clones. Most pecan trees in the USA actually have the roots of another species. Pecan trees do not have sturdy roots. Grafting them onto strong roots solves that problem. These scientists, however, did not make copies of an adult. They cannibalized an embryo. Cloning is still good enough, I think.
Twins and clones are not necessarily the same. Mitochondria have their own (small) genome, and mitochondria are inherited soley from your mother (via the egg cell from whence you sprang). So twins will share the same genome and the same mitochondria; clones could have different mitochondria if different host mothers are used.
This difference would normally be insignificant, but there are some diseases that are inherited via the mitochondria.
As it was mentioned by other /.ers here, this is real cloning, because cloning, in generally, means "getting something genetically identical". In especially, in molecular biology you often say about "cloning a gene", which has less in common with getting a dozen of Einsteins out of a bunch of Einsteins' hair.
The goal of the study was twofold. First, it is the first time a nonhuman primate clone was obtained. Second, the idea is of making a large scale experiment to look for possible abnormalities and/or distortions of resulting clones, as well as differences among them.
Another question was, at what stage of development is it safe to do the embryo splitting, e.g. is it possible to get a 32 cell embryo and divide it into 32 single cells, each resulting in a viable embryo?
The authors did not answer all the question fully, they rather prepared the ground for research yet to come. There are a lot of things to test, the goal not being necessarly cloning of humans (or even monkeys) itself, but rather basic research on development of primates and establishing cultures of embryonic cells (which are, as you know, very useful, because they are able to develope into any mature cell of a given organism).
Of course, getting genetically identical monkeys for drug research is also an issue, although I personally consider research on monkeys very questionable. Chimpansees are much more close to humans then most of the people think - if you haven't read any of Jane Goddals books on chimpansees, do not answer to this point of my reply. What I want to say is that I consider it to be more human to do the phase I drug research on human volunteers, yes, or even humans which are forced to do so - but are conscious of what is happening to them. Doing experiments on chimpansees is something like doing research on children for me.
Regards,
j.