from the I-want-a-pony-and-a-pony-and-a-pony... dept.
A dog lies unconscious on the operating table, as Woosuk Hwang gently lifts the puppy from its womb. While I watch, one of his researchers, David Kim, tells me about the original – the source of this puppy's DNA.
He calls it the original, because the nearly born puppy is a clone.
Hwang snips open the amniotic sac and the little fur ball slips out into the world. It's black, wet – and motionless. An assistant wraps it in a towel, massages it gently – and it starts to yelp. Success!
This puppy is a sign of things to come for Hwang and his lab. For the past few years, the lab has worked on cloning domestic dogs. Now the researchers plan move on to saving their wild relatives. They want to rescue some of the world's most endangered canids, including the Ethiopian wolf and the dhole, or Asiatic wild dog.
This has raised concerns among conservationists, not least because they fear cloning will be little more than a shiny distraction from wider efforts to preserve habitats and biodiversity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @06:42AM
No cloning required. Just sell the same dog to 500 buyers, and by the time they get together to bring a class action suit against you, their money is already invested in offshore overseas Nazi gold. Capitalism. It works, bitches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:15AM
This is not about endangered speices, this is about dinner. Everyone knows black dog tastes the best.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:24AM
(Score: 5, Racist)
Excellent work. Don't ever stop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:31AM
How could this comment possibly be racist? I said "everyone knows that black dogs taste the best". That includes Chinese people, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Uighurs, Tartars, Uzbekis, Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Austrians, Italians, Swabians, Lombards, Franks, Normans, Friseans, Brits, Algonquins, Aztecs, Athabaskans, Kwakutils, Samoans, Fijians, Papua New Guineans, Moros, Australians, Madagaskarians and of course the Zanza-barbarians. Everyone knows. (If I left anyone out, my apologies!)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 13 2016, @10:07AM
Because it discriminated dogs according to their race. Duh.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:46PM
They're not Chinese, they're Korean. Also, Chinese don't eat dogs. Koreans do. The practice is declining even among them, though. There are restaurants in Manchuria that serve dog, but they're run by ex-pat North Koreans and mainly cater to them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:26AM
The major problem of an endangered species is lack of DNA diversity. Population becomes inbred. Sickness, weakness and madness ensues. Followed by extinction.
(A clone by definition has the exact same DNA.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @07:37AM
Each new generation of inbreeding produces hotter and hotter twincest pr0n. Bring it 0n, baby.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 13 2016, @10:17AM
So you say they are producing hot dogs?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:37AM
But the lack of diversity is only an issue if we are doing natural breeding, which depends on melding DNA. Yes, very bad things can happen then. But cloning is not doing that, it starts with one DNA sequence, and sticks with that exact same DNA sequence, so once we have the "original" we want, there will be no degeneration as would occur with inbreeding. Or am I missing something? Is this like Xerox? After the third copy, the definition gets degraded, and errors creep in? Not cloning, then, is it? Diversity may be valuable for other reasons, but this confuses two very different issues.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 13 2016, @10:15AM
The problem is with lack of diversity. Normally, if an illness comes up for which a certain genetic variant is especially vulnerable, then this doesn't matter much because it affects only a small fraction of the population. But with cloned animals, if it affects one of them, it affects all of them, since all have the same genetic variant.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure the idea is to put the clones back in the wild, where it's then natural breeding again. Which means that the problems you mention will matter as well.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:50PM
Presumably eventually we'll be good enough with genetic manipulation to correct for the lack of diversity. Meanwhile, the species is sustained through cloning until we reach that point.
It seems like a decent stopgap measure, which we're going to need as ecosystems collapse before we can get this whole climate change thing under control. The main drawback is it's labor intensive.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday February 13 2016, @11:55AM
Assuming they're doing this for species already on the brink of extinction, 1) they're not exactly doing harm (probably) and 2) it's not like they have a lot of DNA diversity to work with. Imagine you only have five grues left on the planet, the best you can do is clone all five a hundred times each, release them, and hope for the best. Assuming you want to restore them to the wild, of course; alternatively you can keep all five in experimentally controlled environments, thus ensuring their survival albeit dependent on human care-taking.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday February 14 2016, @02:31AM
It is very dark.... I *knew* we should have left well enough alone!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday February 13 2016, @03:05PM
Actually it should, especially if coupled with strategic culling. Each offspring will still get a different mix of DNA from its cloned parents - effectively you're dramatically increasing the number of offspring each "individual" has, as well as the number of different pairings involved. That will increase the number of offspring both with and without genetic diseases. Cull the individuals with the most egregiously harmful genes, and you're left with a much larger, more genetically varied, and healthy population than you could get naturally.
Of course you're still dealing with much less total diversity than if the population hadn't collapsed in the first place. but after the collapse has happened it's much better than nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @10:23AM
Ah, the stem cell fraudster, woosuk hwang [wikipedia.org], still engaged in dubious and nefarious activities.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:51PM
He'll probably stop when he achieves his triumph, the four-assed monkey.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @04:51PM
Hwang snips open the amniotic sac and the little fur ball slips out into the world. It's black, wet – and motionless. An assistant wraps it in a towel, massages it gently – and it starts to yelp. Success! Hwang then proceeds to season and prep the mother for roasting. The newborn pup is promptly stunned and tossed into a boiling pot. "This will be a most wonderful feast...A feast of success!" Hwang joyously announces. He then proceeds to explain how much Koreans love to eat dogs. "We now have a solution for our brothers to the north, who like us, love eating dog. But they have little or no dog meat. A single one of my dog cloning facilities can feed an entire NK gulag." Hwang explains. There is little doubt in my mind that as much as the Korean has advanced, they are still very much backwards with respect to their lust for eating doge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:10PM
Now SJWs tell foreigners what to eat. Next thing they will dictate how farts must smell.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:07PM
perfecting cloning is just part of what we need to permanently preserve the animals of our ecosystem.
* artificial womb environments
* large number of genetic samples (to be sequenced) and brain "uploads"
* artificial brains to work in new organic bodies
if we can make all these things happen, we can recreate our ecosystem on Earth-like planets. of course, knowing humans, we'll be wanting to recreate our star and planets/planetoids before we're happy with our preservation efforts. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @12:24AM
We don't yet have a proper artificial womb, let alone one that can work reliably after thousands or tens of thousands of years in space. If I were sending out capsules of living things to other star systems, I'd keep them small, simple and rugged. Bacteria, archaebacteria, algae, fungi, protozoa and seeds of flowering plants would have a somewhat plausible chance of surviving. For animals, I'd keep it to the eggs of spiders and insects, and of course tardigrades. Without an artificial womb, ovoviviparous animals such as frogs and scorpions would be out, let alone mammals.