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Dolly meet Dotty: Pig Cloning
Narc writes "A new breakthrough in the cloning process has seen the introduction of 5 baby cloned pigs. Some of the claimed benefits would affect organ transplants such as heart, liver, kidney etc, and also diabetes. Get this tho, one of the pigs has been called Dotcom.
I dread to think what names are gonna come up in the future if they have to call one in the first batch 'Dotcom'. I mean, running out of names already... "
Just be glad they didn't call the pig "/.". I mean, the pig runs at 400 MPH, speaks intelligently saying that people are either insightful or informative and ocasionally offtopic, and for some unknown reason just stops midstride, falls over, and becomes completely comatose once a week. But, we just accept this. "There is nothing wrong with the pig, and we're working to fix it as fast as possible." ;)
It's not IF the patient will die, the point is WHEN the patient will die. As someone else mentioned, the point was to extend the life long enouh fo a donor to be found.
The line that bothered me more was the point about higher primates being a better match but pigs being more morally acceptable. Sure, hack apart a "meat" animal that you don't have a problem sending the rest to the slaughter house but don't think about raising something we might identify with for the process. I keep flashing back toi the Hithchicker's Guide where the meat animal in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe marketted it butt off, literally. It would be so much more acceptable to mutate it into something grown in an artificial womb with no other organs/body parts so you could just pluck it out as having no othe purpose...
It's good to see this kind of stuff finally happening. I realize that many people find cloning and genetic engineering distasteful. I find it a little queasy myself. But I'm sure that I will feel different when I'm 84 and I can buy a heart transplant for a thousand bucks. (which will probably won't even buy a gallon of gas by then :).
Manipulating and replicating genes is just another technology. It can be used for good or (my fav) for evil. Passing legislation to stop or retard it is not the answer. If we don't create this technology someone else will. And then we won't even get the benefits. Eventually, all people will want this technology and I, for one, would like to be in the driver's seat instead of standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride.
I do not fear genetic engineering. I fear the lack of it.
- joshyProp me up beside the jukebox if I die.
You think christening a pig with a dotcom moniker is bad, read the article that Salon had yesterday, "Thoroughly modern eMillie". Perhaps the most amusing -- or disgusting -- is the reference to the legal battle with Apple over the name "iMack".
- Various pig transplants, usually not bigger than heart valves (excuse me for my bad english here) have been attempted first in the 60-es when the heart surgery was just emerging and they all failed.
- There are few new developments that show that there are some chances in making the pig tissue more antigen neutral. The problem is that these do not go further than tissue.
- The experiment in cloning pigs is supposed to be a preliminary in bridging these two
My 0.02$Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Things heretofore never considered:
Pig name squatting.
sci.bio.cloning.pork.pork.pork
"how much is that kidney in the window? Pork! Pork! Pork! The one with the dotcom in it's name?"
"Kerrrrmmmiiiit!!!!! Haaaaaaayyyyyyyyahhhhh!!!" in stereo.
With this, and genetic engineering, I just might live long enough to see PIGS FLY! I dread the though of all those promises I'd have to live up to.
Flying pigs? And you thought Seagulls made a mess on your windshield..
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Better make sure that no remnant of your dog is left around, either. Your dog's DNA could be extracted (theoretically) from its feces, urine, hairs, saliva, blood, etc.
Simple. Animals don't genetically modify other animals.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Actually, there are already places where you can store your pet's DNA samples so that at some point in the future when cloning is cheaper and legal, you will be able to create a new clone of your pet after he/she has died.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
It's a crime that one of them wasn't named IPO. Especially given the financial model.
I am sure even a perfect diet wouldn't stop all cases of organ transplantation. There's still accidents (no diet can fix those) and hereditary (sp?) problems. Organ transplants will still be necessary for a long time. It is however true that the 'western' diet isn't the healthiest of diets, but saying diet is a miracle cure? I don't think so. diets can help your health in a major way (don't believe me? live on only french fries for a year, add mayonaise to taste), but they are not cures.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
They could have named it Dotedu. Or Dotnet. Actually, I kinda like dotnet. Or Dotcouk. It's a good thing that TLD isn't enforced, or it would have to be named Dotcomus (which brings up the topic of 70's obscure pagan folk music, but that's another story ;-) Or they could have named it gnarphlager.
I should stop. I'm having way too much fun with this.
That'll do, pig, that'll do
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
Are you a vegetarian?
From the pig's point of view, is havng its organs implanted in a person any different from being eaten?
The cake is a pie
Hmmm....I don't think they all failed. I have a coworker who has one (a pig heart valve). (From the last ten years, I assume.)
(Or did you mean anything bigger than a heart valve failed? If so, nevermind.)
The cake is a pie
> Would your opinion change tomorrow if you found out that your liver was failing and the only way to survive was to have a pig's liver transplanted into you? I'm guessing you wouldn't (BICBW).
There are some people who would, myself included. If my kidney were failing as of right now, I wouldn't be too ecstatic, but I would also accept that it is my time to go (even though I'm far from religious...?) My father has MS and is on all kinds of test drugs that "require" the laboratory slaughter of mice. If i were in his situation I would get accupuncture and possibly even pot for the pain.
Now, I am a vegan/animal rights activist, so I'll do my bit here. My feeling is that, in the broad scope of time, humans did happen to become the first intelligent-enough species on earth to have civilization and agriculture. But that doesn't mean we should rule the world. We do not own animals and most people would agree with me there I think. Since we don't own them, how else can one articulate the way we treat them? We subject them to highly unnatural conditions for no other reason than being to our benefit. Not only do we think we own animals, but we're ruthless owners 100 times worse than the very worst of slave owners.
I don't like to put the blame on individuals, partly because I used to be the same way. The blame goes on the the meat industry, the dairy industry, the fast food industry, etc. The meat industry makes us think meat is healthy, when it is far from it. I've been meat free for 3 years now and never had any problems with protein or anything. I also have a lack of motivation so I didn't even do any special research on my diet, don't take any vitamins, and so on. The dairy industry makes us think milk gives us strong bones with the calcium surplus. We don't need milk any more than a weened cow needs milk. It is for newborn calfs! Calfs that double their body weight in their first week of life. Milk is not needed by any human on earth. The fast food industry teaches us to not think about where our food comes from. Every time one gets a 39 cent cheeseburger from McDonald's, a cow has been mistreated (the milk in the cheese and bread), then killed. This "little sidenote" doesn't even occur to the masses, including me when I ate meat. Bah bah bah, that's what they want us to do, and that's exactly what we do.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
So this process, then, strips the patient of his natural immortality, I presume? ;)
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
On an aside, one of the members of the team used to be friends with my SO. He went to art school after that, studying design Central StMartins because his main aim in life was growing music equipment and TV's...
Working for the (other) man
"A new breakthrough in the cloning process has seen the introduction of 5 baby cloned pigs. Some of the claimed benefits would affect organ transplants such as heart, liver, kidney etc, and also diabetes."
Let's not forget that this will also mean increased ham and bacon production. To quote Homer Simpson, "Mmmmmm...cloned meat products *drool*"
"Get this tho, one of the pigs has been called Dotcom. I dread to think what names are gonna come up in the future if they have to call one in the first batch 'Dotcom'. I mean, running out of names already..."
Christ, this whole damn "dotcom" shit is getting out of hand! First we have that Mr. Dotcom nerd in Dallas shacking up for a year, and now we're naming pigs dotcom. Yeesh!
But if you think that's bad, I recall an Ann Landers or Dear Abby column where some lady wanted to know who the hell "Dot Com" was, and why everyone's talking about her.
*shakes head*
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
I am a student at Vanderbilt university, and I am personally interested with the ethics and practicality of cloning and genetic engineering for commercial gain. However, I believe that this new cloning technique is far, far more valuable than just that.
One of the more interesting things about these pigs is that there are FIVE of them. With Dolly the sheep, the cloners had to try over and over as most of the cloned sheep embryos never made it to birth. The fact that they have five pigs that appear to be the same "age" tells me that either they burned a ludicrious amount of money to get five identical pigs at an efficiency rate comparable to Dolly's or that they developed a new technique that raises efficiency enough such that they only had to use several adult female pigs to give birth. Or even that they (gasp!) had them in the same litter; i.e. they were birthed by the same sow. If it IS a dramatic hike in efficiency, this advancement begins to dull some of the ethical argument of "an embryo is a person too" against human cloning and human cloning research.
Also, these pigs are the ultimate nature vs. nuture scientific tool. In the case of Dolly, they had one sheep that was genetically identical to another adult. In the case of these pigs, they have multiple pigs with exactly the same genetic makeup. A litter of pigs with the same genetic makeup could be bred and experimented with by the scientific community. As a previous poster has mentioned, this eliminates one of the variables -- if the natures of a set animals can be held constant, the nutures can be varied and studied. Before now this has not been possible. The importance of nature vs. nuture cannot be overemphasized, as it is a debate that has been raging ever since it was known that genes affect how the body grows and develops. Are we shaped more by our genetic makeup or by the way in which we are raised?
Here at Vanderbilt there is a discussion and debate this afternoon that asks the question "Are we playing God with our genes?", and I plan to bring these pigs into the discussion. This could be interesting ;)
Brandon Nuttall
Where is the dividing line between human and animal?
A pig with a few genes modified to make its, say, heart, more appropriate for xenografting (sharing between species) is, obviously, still mostly a pig.
Take the same pig, modify more genes to make the skin easily graftable. It, I suppose, is still mostly a pig.
Continue the modifications. At what point are we, literally, killing humans to harvest them for organs?
I cannot imagine that intelligence would be the dividing factor. Even if Fred couldn't make an intelligent contribution to Slashdot (;->), you don't have the right to kill Fred for his organs.
So... what -is- the dividing factor between man and animal?
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
(AP - New York) - Marketing executives from Microsoft online presence MSN announced today another big publicity/ad campaign stunt featuring a "living online" experience. In this experiment, a newly cloned pig named DotComPig will be given a swank Upper East Side apartment, and survive solely on goods purchased online.
When asked how the pig would be trained to surf the web, much less put up with the frequent lag times and error pages generated by MSN, marketing worm Brad Sythe exclaimed "He's a fucking pig! We're just going to carve him up and use him for catering at the wrap party afterward anyway! Jeez!".
The new ad campaign is expected to begin next week.
While organs from animals may help in the future, you could check the mechanisms that allow Spain to have one of the highest rates of donors and transplants in the world now at the Organización Nacional de Trasplantes
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I've heard that the tellomere's on Dolly are much shorter than normal and likely to lead to a shorter lifespan. (I'm sure you know that Tellomere DNA is the junk at the end of the chromosomes which make them more robust to copying).
When I heard this an idea struck me - why not create pets by repeated cloning of an animal - so that the lifespan of the pet is short enough that pets can really be 'just for christmas'.
This idea gets better when you look at the meat industry - you can make you animals live just long enough to reach full size and then die. That way nobody has to kill them in the Slaughterhouse, they just hop onto the conveyor belt and pass away peacefully and naturally.
;-)
I wonder how all this cloning business will affect our current views on the age old argument about whether Environment or Genetics has more effect on the personality/psyche of animals and humans. If we can have animals with exact-match DNA, then we have a control group an experimentation group that are identical and reduce our equation to one variable. Take one pig from DNA group A and one from DNA group B and have them reared by mother Pig A and mother Pig B, and have mother C raise two pigs from Group A, and D raise two from group B.. you get the idea. I bet findings regarding the interactions of animals with different DNA as opposed to the same DNA would be very interesting from a sociology point of view. One of my old teachers always used to say that we are 100% our genes and 100% our environment, and I think that would be supported by these studies, but it would be interesting to see some real results now that we can have a perfect test group. Just a thought.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
This actually confirms that Sun's support people are a bunch of pig-fuckers! After all, Sun did put the dot in Dotcom.. I just hope it was in Kentucky, because otherwise Scotty is going to end up playing Cell Block 4's own personal Dotcom for the next three-to-five..
.sig: Now legally binding!
I don't know about anyone else here, but growing organs in animals is slightly distasteful to me.
I know it could have huge benefits, but after having seen a bald mouse with a human ear growing on its back, I'll never approach this subject with the same preconceptions.
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"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.