Scientists To Clone Wooly Mammoth
A cloned pet baby mammoth — Christmas gift craze of the year for 2018. CNN reports:
A team of scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States hopes to clone a mammoth, a symbol of Earth’s ice age that ended 12,000 years ago, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun. The researchers say they hope to produce a baby mammoth within six years.
The scientists say they will extract DNA from a mammoth carcass that has been preserved in a Russian laboratory and insert it into the egg cells of an African elephant in hopes of producing a mammoth embryo.
The team is being led by Akira Iritani, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University in Japan. He has built upon research from Teruhiko Wakayama of Kobe’s Riken Center for Developmental Biology, who successfully cloned a mouse from cells that had been frozen for 16 years, to devise a technique to extract egg nuclei…
South Korean Scientists Clone Beagle That Glows Fluorescent Green
Could Tegon, the glowing dog, be the key to finding cures for many human diseases? Via Reutuers:
South Korean scientists said on Wednesday they have created a glowing dog using a cloning technique that could help find cures for human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Yonhap news agency reported.
A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle, named Tegon and born in 2009, has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic, the report said.
First Cloned Cat Turns Ten Years Old
It feels like just yesterday that the first generation of cloned animals captured the headlines — now they are passing comfortably into old age (without any bizarre mutations, eyeballs spontaneously falling out, et cetera). Cloned pets turning ten is our generation’s Bob Dylan turning seventy. Via the Houston Chronicle:
Almost 10 years later CC, aka Copy Cat, is still in the College Station area. She has a mate, Smokey, and they live with their three offspring in a cat mansion built by Dr. Duane C. Kraemer, an A&M researcher who helped bring CC into the world.
CC and her family seem like perfectly normal cats, which disappoints many guests hoping to see something more exotic, said Kraemer’s wife, Shirley, the head cat wrangler.
A&M’s cat-cloning operation was an offshoot of the Missyplicity Project to clone a dog named Missy with funding help from a company that wanted to market pet cloning. When the…
WikiLeaks: U.S. Government Pondered Raelian Human-Cloning Claims
Lady on bed adorned with Raëlian symbol.
Below are documents leaked from the U.S. Consulate in Montreal, via WikiLeaks:
¶1. SUMMARY: THE FOLLOWING IS SOME BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON
THE MONTREAL-BASED RAELIAN GROUP, WHOSE MEMBER DR. BRIGITTE
BOISSELIER ANNOUNCED AT A DECEMBER 27 PRESS CONFERENCE IN
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA THE BIRTH OF THE FIRST CLONED HUMAN
BEING, A 7 POUND BABY GIRL NICKNAMED EVE. AND ITS TWO MAIN
FIGURES LEADER CLAUDE VORILHON, BETTER KNOWN AS RAEL, AND
DR. BOISSELIER. ONE LIKELY RESULT OF THE BOISSELIER
ANNOUNCEMENT IS THAT CANADA’S PENDING LEGISLATION TO BAN
HUMAN CLONING COULD CONTAIN STRICTER RESTRICTIONS. END
SUMMARY.
¶2. THE RAELIAN MOVEMENT WAS FOUNDED BY FRENCHMAN CLAUDE
VORILHON, A FORMER SPORTS JOURNALIST, FAILED SINGER, RADIO
COMMENTATOR AND AVID STOCK CAR RACER. VORILHON CLAIMS TO
HAVE BEEN CONCEIVED ON DECEMBER 25, 1945, BY A FRENCH MOTHER
AND AN ALIEN FATHER. SPECIALISTS SAY HE WAS BORN IN VICHY,
FRANCE IN 1946. VORILHON WHO USES THE NAME RAEL (GOD’S
LIGHT) (PRONOUNCED RA-EL IN FRENCH (RHYMES WITH KAL-EL AND
JOR-EL)) SAYS HE…
Cloned Cow Milk and Meat Approved For Sale In U.K.
The British equivalent of the FDA just announced that milk and beef from cloned cows is safe for consumption and may be sold without being labelled as such. The dairy and meat of the future has finally arrived…grab yourself a steaming hot cloneburger. The Telegraph reports:
The food safety watchdog said produce from the descendents of cloned pigs and cows is safe to eat and should not have to undergo any extra checks compared with other animals before going on sale.
Ministers are expected to rubber stamp the new guidelines, clearing the final hurdle for the meat and milk of cloned animals to be sold freely in Britain.
The FSA published new advice yesterday which stipulated that farmers must seek a license before selling meat or milk from cloned animals, but not their offspring.
The new guidance was prompted by a scare in the summer when it emerged that meat from the offspring of a…
Should We Clone Neanderthals?
Reconstruction of Neanderthal man. Hermann Schaaffhausen (1888).
From the recent March/April issue of Archaeology. Zach Zorich writes:
If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.
The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia’s Vindija…
Eat Meat From Cloned Cattle
If you really enjoyed a steak from one cow, now you can have the exact same cow again! It’s like a Twilight Zone episode where your plate keeps refilling with the same piece of meat. In an attempt to increase production rate of quality meat, the US has been mass producing meat from cloned cattle. BBC has the report:
Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company.
Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal’s meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass.
US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities.
These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity.
There is a long tradition of resurrecting dead animals for cloning – Dolly the sheep being a case in point.
These exceptional…
