can you clone a beagle for ME? and make it well-behaved
scientists in south korea have cloned a beagle puppy - and not just one. the team started with 344 embryos in 20 dogs, and ended up with 11 pregnancies. of those, five puppies are alive now. and here’s the crazy part - they’re not just any cloned puppies. no, no. that’s already been done. they’re transgenic and being used as models for human disease. their DNA has been injected with sea anemone protein which - in a kind of eerie way - makes them glow under UV light. from the article, i didn’t completely understand what makes that important, other than they’ve been engineered with a type of genetic material that isn’t naturally in their make-up.
i wouldn’t have guessed it - they don’t seem very closely related to us in the scope of evolutionary biology - but apparently dogs are really good models of human disease. (i would’ve guessed a monkey or an ape would be a better bet. but, let’s fact it, who wants a bunch of glowing, baby monkeys running around your lab? beagle puppies are a much better choice!) although complications apparently make it difficult to create dog “knockouts” - animals that are engineered to lack a specific, potentially harmful, gene - because of their longer lifespan, dogs are more relevant to human fertility than mice.
but - according to the article:
Nathan Sutter, a geneticist specialising in dogs at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says “transgenesis is labourious, expensive and slow”.
Add the expense of caring for laboratory-reared dogs and negative public perceptions and it could mean few researchers turn to transgenic dogs like Ruppy, he says: “it’s not on my horizon as a dog geneticist at all.”
of course, keeping puppies in a lab DOES threaten my animal-loving sensibilities, but emotion aside, i’m less excited about what this could mean for, say, cloning pets (because this purpose of cloning is scientific and i don’t THINK i would clone my dogs - but who knows? i REALLY love them) and what it means for scientific advancement. could we eventually engineer the inclination for certain diseases OUT of our DNA? could getting a baby, a pet, or more scientific knowledge one day be as “simple” as systematically growing something in a lab? would this be a good thing?
April 25 2009 08:15 am | science and the future