Slashdot Mirror
South Korean Scientists Clone Dog
Ebon Praetor writes "According to the BBC and Reuters, South Korean scientists have created the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound. The research purpose of the research is ostensibly to produce research animals and not for commercial purposes. Dogs are especially difficult to clone, but the scientists were able to extract DNA from a skin cell, inject it into an egg, and implant the egg into a surrogate mother."
Why are cloning dogs "notoriously difficult"? Is it because of the wide range of variability within the species?
Whether or not people have objections about cloning based on moral or religious reasons, I doubt that anyone would be willing to accept a 1 in 1000 success rate for attempting to clone a person. Whether or not the clones have souls, are real people, or any of the other arguments that apply, I don't think people would want 999 failures out of 1000 tries.
So until people become more accepting of cloning and the science is able to produce reliable results, I don't think we'll see it done with humans anytime soon.
What made Buster be Buster was not his DNA. They way he was raised and environment and what not affected his personality way more than DNA ever could. In a few hundred years you might be able to put him in a copy machine and spit out an identical one, but until then he'll be alike in DNA only. Even spots aren't hereditary.
[ ]
For testing to have worth a damn, you need to know the genetic history of the animal. Also, you can create animals with a specific genetic disorders to test meds against.
Magine being able to test a drug were all the test animal were identical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hang on a minute - I posted this joke first and was modded down as a Troll. Bloody PETA moderators.
Read Charlotte's Web, watch Babe, and keep a pig as a pet for a while. See if you don't feel like eating pork any more. I'd bet you would feel a slight bit edgy, but that's only because our culture doesn't make eating pork shameful or socially discourage the practice. If we had the same snide jokes about people eating pigs as we did about people eating dogs, you'd certainly find less people having bacon with their eggs.
If you're not squimish about eating beef, pork, chicken, or any other kind of meat, dog really shouldn't bother you. Yet because our culture identifies dogs and cats as pets and friendly, domesticated creatures we're prone to frown on eating them. To me, it seems as though it's almost viewed in the same light as canabalism.
To be blatantly honest, we Westerns are the ones being hypocritical and irrational for the most part. I don't know whether or not dog tastes good, and I might be willing to try it just for the sake of trying it, but I've been culturally conditioned to not want to eat dog.
Actually, this would be completely worthless for the purpose of drug testing (ie pre-clinical trials) precisely because all the test subjects would have the same genetic background. You WANT to test on animals with variable genetic background because it's more similar to the human population (in that there's genetic variablility). Say there's an SNP in some dog gene that causes those dogs to have some horrible side-effect, (say 5% of them die, whereas testing on mice may not show this since they're inbred.) then you could extrapolate such a potential side effect to human beings. Now, if you go off and test your drug on 500 genetically identical dogs, ones without that SNP, then you'll think everything's fine, and go into clinical trials. You'll only discover that 5% of the population has the horrible side effect when you test on the genetically diverse human population.
Is it possible for a SNP in dogs to have the same effect as one in human beings in response to a drug? It's unlikely, but it's not impossible, and it's certainly an area of active research.
I'm not convinced that a cloned animal is going to give you that much more information than an inbred strain of mouse where the genetic background is stable. In high throughput studies (such as microarrays), it's been possible to determine the order in which a group of normal mice were sacrificed by looking at the expression level of various stress related genes. (Imagine being a mouse in a cage with 25 other buddies. Suddenly, over several hours, your friends start disappearing. You start to get nervous..) Bottom line is that you can detect non-genetic variability between individuals using inbred strains. Why bother cloning animals, other than to get a Nature paper saying "we used cloned animals" ?
We generally don't eat predators of any kind. They're generally just not very tasty, whether, cat, dog, ferret, cassowary or whatever.
The only predators we eat on a regular basis are fish.
It's not a cultural issue so much as it is that most predatory species have too little marbling and too much stringy muscle.
Dogs, snakes, and other predators are eaten in the Far East more for the association of the animals' living characteristics than for their flavor.
First of all, why would you compare two preachers that are talking about two totally different, completely unrelated things?
I'm not sure what you mean. In my example, their products are different but not dissimilar. There's no reason you can't compare a religious conviction that prevents you wearing clothes made of different fabrics (inconvenient) with one that prevents you cloning people (no problem - I wasn't going to anyway).
And second of all, if they were really getting with the times, why are they still around at all?
Because there's still a vast pool of customers for their services. They need to move with the times to provide the sort of religion that today's customers are looking for. If they don't do that then they really will go out of business but right now they're doing okay.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2