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South Korean Scientists Clone Dog

Posted by timothy on from the this-is-one-clone-with-a-seoul dept.

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."

3 of 404 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sounds like humans the next step... by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I honestly doubt it will be tried for a long while. First of all there are a lot of moral and religious objections to cloning a human. Second of all, cloning is still a fairly clumsy science. If you read in the article it says that they had 1000 embryos to start with. Of those 1000 implanted, 3 turned into pregnancies. Of those 3 pregnancies, 2 births occured (1 miscarried). Of those 2 births, 1 died less than a month after birth. Success rate, 1 in 1000.

    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.

  2. Re:Soylent Green is DOGGGGGGGGGG by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I think most of the objection that comes from our culture about anyone eating dogs is because we keep them as pets here. It's a little bit harder to eat something commonly regarded as "man's best friend" here.

    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.

  3. Re:Soylent Green is DOGGGGGGGGGG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.