I did a Lowdown on Cloning way back in the day that mentioned the “spider goats” being developed by Nexia Biotechnlogoies (here in Canada—woot!); a goat that produces spider silk in its milk that when woven into, say, a bullet proof vest, is actually tougher than steel.

It seems the transgenic research and development groups haven’t stopped there! From the Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences of the Estonian University of Life Sciences (man that’s a mouth full) we get the “Golden Calf”; a bovine able to produce insulin in its cow milk!

It doesn’t stop there, the technology behind this development can actually have the transgenic cow produce other hormones and antibodies in its milk—like antibodies for people suffering from cancer or rheumatism. Imagine that! This Golden Calf development, if proven successful, can provide the miracles humanity could worship over with transcendent song, sexual dance and festivities—

Oh shit… wait a minute that didn’t turn out so well in the bible, did it?

Ignore that last part.

Professors Sulev Kõks and Ülle Jaakma, the leads on the project hope to see this <whisper>Golden Calf</whisper> in production as early as 2010. Think about this: They state that producing one cow capable of this milky medicinal marvel is 30 to 40 times cheaper and more effective than current methods. One of these “normal” calves, valued at half a million USD, eating grass all peaceful-like in a field could theoretically produce 10% of the WORLD’s insulin market, which is valued at $10 billion USD!

ONE COW PEOPLE!

I can see the commercial adoption of this biological alternative to substance manufacturing becoming the new trend in the next century. Why produce stuff in labs with man labour when you can let it produce itself and then just harvest it? Many jobs could be lost—but then again, who’s going to take care of the new breed of cows?

I just got hit with the silly notion that future farmers are going to have to have some sort of Sciences degree to scale in the farming industry… crazy thoughts… crazy thoughts…

Original Image (Flickr CC-By): JelleS

Recently, the Tasmanian Tiger hit the news once again–No, no, not Jaason SImmons–that Tasmanian Tiger is still all washed up after his run on Baywatch. Instead it’s time for me to tackle the news on the Tasmanian Tiger implanted DNA cells in a mouse in a less “oh my God, this is finally Jurassic Park, for real man!” kind of way. I won’t lie though, it’s definitely what I imagined when I first read the news—almost those words exactly on hindsight actually. Let me tell, you when I watched Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park back in 1993, I was a believer that that kind of technology was coming soon to pull off that kind of miracle. I still, to this day, DEMAND that science make that happen in my life time. But Science is busy people you know–

To continue, the Tasmanian Tiger was never an animal I looked into before (lets use “thylacine” for now to save on typing and the incorrect usage of the capitalized word “Tiger” throughout the article). I knew of it, sure; that wolf-thing that wasn’t really a tiger at all that went extinct at some point back in the day.

While digging around the net I discovered the black and white film of the thylacine pacing back and forth in its cage at the Hobart Zoo, filmed in 1933 by naturalist David Fleay, three years before it became extinct as a species. It was a tragic 62 seconds to know that such a beautifully screwed up looking beasty had to fall to the ignorance of man. This death of this last thylacine on 7 September 1936 was finally granted National Threatened Species Day since 1996; It is held annually on 7 September in Australia, to commemorate its death.

It looked like a thin wolf or thick coyote, a long head and intimidating jaw that opens 120 degrees wide weighed down its equally long and powerful neck, zebra-like stripes spanned its hind-quarters and a tail like that of a kangaroo arched towards the ground which even allowed it to stand up on its haunches for some time. It wasn’t feline at all. It wasn’t even canine. It’s a marsupial and closer related to the Australian-native kangaroo than to either of the former mentions. It even had a pouch were it would raise its young, but the opening was reversed. Even the males had pouches to protect their dangling members while rampaging trough thick brush lest they wanted to self-neuter themselves in the process of chasing down their next meal.

Scientists at the Universities of Melbourne and Texas have successfully re-activated one of the thylacine’s genes (Col2a1 to be exact) in the embryo of a lab mouse. Before you get all creative, this does not mean that the mouse is going to turn into a mini Tasmanian tiger! That’s a reality dreamers like me have to invent in la-la land in the pre-hours before actually dreaming. All the gene does is help develop cartilage and future bone in the wee meeses; Col2a1 is actually a gene that can be found in most vertebrates already, including humans. That being said, where can I volunteer to have that mojo injected into me? Whao!–unless it made my jaw drop down wide like that fat-sucking chick in Smallville season 3, screw that, I take it back!

What’s important here is that, for the first time ever, a long dead gene has been introduced into a living host that actually accepted it. From here, scientists are able to track and analyse the function of the gene for continued research into the dead gene’s behaviour, opening the doors for further scientific study of the biology of creatures thought to be long lost.

It’s interesting that almost a decade ago the “serious” academics were putting down as impossible and referring it to a “circus” The Australian Museum in Sydney when it began a cloning project in 1999. The project’s intent was to extract the thylacine genes from a 136-year-old pup in ethanol and rebuild the entire genome. The next obvious step would then be to create breeding clones to bring back the mascot of Tasmania’s Coat of Arms—all a mission hoped to be achieved in the next 10 years. How romantic a concept. Enough to receive words of discouragement of the highest order:

Jeremy Austin, of the University of Queensland likened the task of reconstructing a thylacine’s genome to trying to rebuild, in order, a complete set of encyclopeadias that had been torn into little pieces and had had some of pages burnt or singed.

Poor Professor Archer won the Australian Sceptic of the Year award in 1998 and even won a Sceptics Bent Spoon Award, for “the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudo-scientific piffle”. Did that stop him? Hell no! His reply seems as rational as believing humans would one day take photos of Martian rocks. Professor Archer refuted:

That might be what he anticipated but we found great big chunks, torn into big chunks. The challenge is enormous but it is not what he is describing.[..] Scientists tend to assume that what hasn’t happened, can’t happen.

Bad and good news. The bad news in February 2005 was that this fantastical project was going to be cancelled due to the genes being to degraded. The good news is that three months later it was restarted with backup from interested universities and a research institute! Now three years after it seems the dream is still alive in motivation at least by others not as defeatist as grumpy Jeremy Austin. Scientists still see the prospects of creating a thylacine clone as an unlikely possibility or virtually impossible or like Marilyn Renfree, a professor of zoology puts it:

[It's] probably an impossible dream. Our study was aimed at developing methods for examining the function and evolution of genes from extinct mammals. [...] We made one tiny step forward by looking at the function of one gene, but you never know what will be possible someday?

Might I note that Neil Armstrong also said “one small step for man” when stepping on the moon for the first time? At least NOW the “serious” academics are only saying “unlikely”, “virtually impossible” and “never know what will be possible”. I think the Australian Skeptics guys behind The Bent Spoon Awards need to rename their continuously unclaimed awards to something better. Obviously they’ve never watched The Matrix…

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

My lifetime thus far has taught me one thing: Never bind man with things he can not do, it’ll only make him eventually do them. Failing only makes him try harder.

You hear that Professor Archer?! You still have a year left my man! If that’s not enough then take another 10 YEARS damnit! There is no spoon! THERE IS NO SPOOOOOON!

–I think I just saw a thick jawed dude jump past my apartment window in a tight royal blue spandex–

Earlier this week (May 20th to be exact), UK Priminister Gordon Brown made the extremely complicated moral decision of releasing the ban on human-animal hybrid animal stem cell research. This is an exciting day for science and will hopefully set the United Animal Kingdom once again as a pioneer in stem cell research. They brought us the first test tube baby (Louise Joy Brown, 1978) and the world’s first cloned animal using nonembryonic cells (Biologist John Gurdon, tadpole,1962). This National Geopgraphic article is wrong. It incorrectly states that UK is the first to develop an animal clone when in fact it was American biologists by the name of Robert Briggs and Thomas King (also a tadpole, embryonic). Maybe these next biologists will finally bring us a dogboy, yes? My fingers are crossed!

Priminister Brown put a statement together that puts it plainly in Britain’s The Observer newspaper:

I believe that we owe it to ourselves and future generations to introduce these measures, and in particular, to give our unequivocal backing within the right framework of rules and standards, to stem cell research.

It was only a matter of time for a country in the world to finally be the one to raise the blockade. Why in the world would the scientific community–or humans for that matter–deny the chance to save millions of lives when they have the chance to discover the next big cure through progress in stem cell research? How many people actually believed this line would never be crossed?

The world is flat, if you sail to the edge of the world your boat will fall over the edge. The sun orbits the Earth. Wrong again. You can’t leave the Earth. Neil Armstrong lands on the moon. Now we have the Phoenix Mars Lander scooping out Mars for signs of potential life!

In the other corner of the ring, with opinions supported by religious leaders, pro-life campaigners, and a large section of lawmakers, Conservative lawmaker Edward Leigh states:

In many ways we are like children playing with land mines without any concept of the dangers of the technology that we are handling.

What? First of all this is nothing like “children playing with landmines”. That implies that the scientific community willing to pursue unorthodox practices aren’t aware of the moral implications of “crossing the line”. Children who play with landmines are ignorant of the fact that THEY CAN KILL THEMSELVES! Never in the history of the world have I heard a tale of a child who played with a landmine and accidentally healed memory loss in people over the age of 65 worldwide (along with out degenerative diseases of course).

Here’s a more appropriate analogy:

In many ways we are like children playing in a sandbox with teachers and parents telling us that there are germs in the sand that could make us sick, so we shouldn’t be in the sandbox. Then some kids get out of the sandbox while others stay in.

The ones that stay in develop language faster through social interaction; develop fine motor skills and hand eye co-ordination; learn cause and effect–dry sand flows, wet sand builds castles; learn social behaviour–sand thrown in someone’s eyes makes them cry, sand thrown in yours teaches you why they cried, so don’t do it again, etc.

What you have then is children on the sidelines watching the other children developing new relationships, building things through experimentation (sand castles), and heck, some of them DON’T get sick from the germs making them later regret that they never got to join in the fun.

What needs to be put in place for children playing in the sandbox are sanitation guidelines and rules of conduct–not to tell them the CAN’T play in the sandbox because it’ll make them sick.

How’s that for an analogy–and I pulled that out of my ass. Moral lines must be crossed in order to develop as the superior creature on this planet. End of story.

And I want to see a dogboy in my lifetime.

Technically the second part of the Cloning episode, this continuation focuses on some scientificly encourage “evolution” of new breeds of species created by mixing different animal DNA. This could be stuff out of science fiction, but XEI just thinks it’s stuff out of awesomeience faction. Recently you all got the lowdown on cloning. The topic was so large we decided to bring you a part two. Nuno gives you the lowdown on chimeras, transgenic animals; animals injected with the DNA of other animals outside of their own species is one thing, but the real controversy is when human DNA entered the scene. This is the new Age of the United States of Chimerica!

Works Cited: Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy | Transgenic Animals | Gods and Monsters | Assisted Human Reproduction Act [Not in force] ( 2004, c. 2 ) | Human Chimera Prohibition Act of 2005 (Introduced in Senate)

[Note: I am beginning to enjoy these "editorial" note sections.]

The second retro-episode features a topic that is still very much on XEI’s radar. Nuno will be covering related news in the future! In the meantime, he presents you with something to peak your curiosity! The possibility of human cloning, raised when Scottish scientists at Roslin Institute created the much-celebrated sheep “Dolly” in 1997. Nuno gives the lowdown on cloning and its moral and ethical implications. Our science is starting to deliver us topics that seem to be creations out of a science fiction novel. Are we playing Great Maker or just geniuses at survival methods?

Works Cited: Human Genome Project Information | Goats and Spider Webs | Taiwan breeds green-glowing pigs

[Note: Notice how I use the third person in the summary text--Yes, I am THAT pretentious... or it's for search engine optimization. You pick.]