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... "

Comments

This Just In From The APWire

[dougman]

(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.

The Spanish transplant system

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

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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Tellomere Depletion and Lifespan

[szyzyg]

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.

;-)

Re:could be worse

[King Babar]

They could have named it Dotedu. Or Dotnet. Actually, I kinda like dotnet. Or Dotcouk.

Well, given that Dotcom is destined to be such a famous pig, I think it was very short-sighted to give it a name that you haven't claimed a hostname for. Take Dolly The Sheep. Or rather, don't, since dollythesheep.com is already taken (as is clonesheep.com).

Yes, these poor pignamers did face a challenge, since all of the following are already taken:

1. dotcom.com
2. dotcom.net
3. dotcom.org
4. com.com
5. com.net
6. com.org
7. net.com
8. net.net
9. net.edu
10. net.org
11. edu.com
12. edu.net
13. edu.edu
14. edu.org

Yes, com.edu is actually available. Now, the coolest name for the pig would have been dotdot. Dotdot.com is taken, but dotdot.edu is not, and we could pretend that this whole project has some educational or academic purpose...

Effects on sociology/genetics argument

[Phizzy]

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

Disappointed..

[technos]

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..

Growing organs

[naasking]

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 ... invisible ... THING ... !"

Re:Growing organs

[aliastnb]

> I don't know about anyone else here, but growing organs in animals is slightly distasteful to me.

That's as maybe, but you cite only one example- the mouse with the ear on its back. This is an example I'm assuming most /. readers will have seen. However, there is a world shortage of suitable transplant organs. Ethics aside, this is one of the few ways that the organs people need are going to be available (at least in the next twenty years or so).

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).

The majority of the world's population already depends on animals- in the form of food. All this is is taking that one stage further. I believe that the growing of organs for humans in animals is inevitable , if simply to allow for better healthcare. A sideshot of this may be that the black market in organ transplants vanishes (or is significantly reduced).

Sure, it's a long way off but if we don't try, who knows what we won't achieve?

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