Beagle puppy Ruby Puppy, or Ruppy for short, is the world’s first transgenic dog. Transgenic means that she has genes from another animal. Ruppy, and four other beagle puppies, were given a florescent gene from a sea anenome which makes her glow red under ultraviolet light.

Ruppy and her sisters are all identical clones of each other.

Kinda cool, kinda freaky and kinda scary all at the same time. And also a little hard to see the point of – why does science need to create a glowing dog?

Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea and his team bred the dogs to test if adding a gene from another species works in dogs. It’s been done in insects and plants, mice, sheep and goats, but Ruppy and her sisters are the first transgenic dogs.

Lee says that next they hope to use the same principle to investigate human fertility. They plan to breed dogs lacking an oestrogen hormone receptor, and use them to study hormone-related infertility in women.

They speculate that the procedure could also be used to study other human diseases using the transgenic dogs as models.

Talk about weird science. Some other geneticists have criticized Lee’s laboratory, saying the procedure is too expensive and slow to truly be useful, and that other methods are better for studying fertility. It does sound very complex to me, but then human fertility is also very complex and poorly understood, so perhaps the scientists will be able to shed light on some fertility issues and the glowing puppies will eventually lead to (not glowing) human babies.

Dr. Severino Antinori came forward on Tuesday to announce that he had cloned three children. He didn’t offer any proof. He did not disclose the identity of any of the children. However, he did give their ages and gender. “It involved two boys and a girl who are nine years old today,” said the doctor. “They were born healthy and they are in excellent health now.”

Sure.

The prominent Italian gynecologist says he achieved–nearly a decade ago–what no other doctor has been able to do since. But he kept it a secret for the sake of the family’s privacy. “I helped give birth to three children with the human cloning technique,” Antinori told Oggi weekly in an interview (which will run Wednesday).

To the reporter’s reminder that human cloning is not only illegal in Italy, but is considered immoral by most of the Catholic population, Dr. Antinori said that it was a matter of semantics. He actually wants people to call his methods “innovative therapies” or “genetic recoding.” But, in the words of former president Bush, call it a banana if you want to. It’s still cloning, if he actually did it.

Antinori claims that the women’s husbands were all sterile. He fertilized their eggs with their fathers’ cells in a laboratory through “nuclear
transfer.” It was similar to the way Dolly the sheep was cloned 13 years ago–but new and improved.

Two weeks ago, Antinori told the world that he was going to help a woman whose husband is in a coma conceive a child. But even that was not the first of his controversial announcements. Fifteen years ago, Antinori helped a 63-year old woman get pregnant and have a child. Sometimes these things happen naturally, but the mother was post-menopausal.

What do I think of these three events? Wrong, wrong, and…liar! A woman who has gone through menopause should not be messing with her body to do something it told her she was too old to do. A man in a coma is a sad thing. I’m sorry that woman and her husband did not have the children she wanted. But he isn’t able to consent to the conception, nor will he be capable of raising the child. So I think it is only for selfish reasons that this woman wants a baby. Maybe she is having emotional difficulty dealing with her husband’s irreversible condition and is hoping a baby will help.

Finally, I don’t believe this guy really cloned three kids. If so, why would he just one day decide to tell us about it without any proof? But if he had done it, I’m not sure it’s the big deal everyone says. I mean, the additional implications are scary, but the fact of creating an embryo through cloning isn’t much different to me than other types of in vitro fertilization. I could be convinced otherwise, I think.

What do you think of this guy?

Last July 25, Louise Brown, turned 30. The day was marked as a major milestone in science and medicine. You see, Louise is the first test tube baby ? the first ever person born through in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Assisted reproduction technology (ART) has come a long way since 1978. Women of menopausal age can now carry and deliver babies. Surrogate mothers or ?wombs for rent? enables women who have undergone hysterectomy to have biological offsprings. Preimplantation genetic diagnostic screening enables parents to screen their embryos for genetic diseases and gender. In April this year, the first ?man? became pregnant and delivered a daughter. So one may ask, where do we go from here?

The 17 July issue of Nature published a special report on ?Making babies: the next 30 years? and interviewed several reproductive medicine experts on what we can expect in the next 30 years. Some of the replies are given below:

• Low-budget IVF – Currently, an IVF cycle can cost thousands of dollars. For the lucky few, it can even be covered by health insurance. There are, however, many countries in this world where IVF is inaccessible financially. By streamlining the procedure and using low-cost drugs, IVF might soon be available to almost anybody.
• Gametes from skin cells – Last year, pluripotent stem cells have been developed from ordinary human skin cells [2]. Research is now being stepped on on the development of gametes from stem cells [3], mainly because of the scarcity of egg donors as well as the legal restrictions associated with egg donations [4]. If this happens within the next 30 years, anybody ? and I mean anybody can have biological offsprings ? and infertility will be a thing of the past.
• Genetic banking – This is the storage of young, healthy cells of people before they start aging and accumulate genetic errors. These cells can be used as ?genetic cassettes? that can be used to correct aging-related errors.
• Artificial wombs – Some researchers are working at the other end of the process ? at delivery. In recent years, premature infants born as early as the 22^nd week of gestation period have been known to survive. The idea of an artificial uterus to carry an embryo to full term is not so far-fetched but can have a lot of ethical and legal implications.
• Cloned babies – According to one expert, reproductive cloning is not that far away although there is no need for it medically.

Louise Brown was a great milestone in science. So was Dolly. I think we can expect great things from reproductive medicine in the coming 3 decades. Maybe even terrible things. But great.

References

1. Nature 454, 260-262 (17 July 2008)
2. Science 318, 1917 – 192021 December 2007
3. Nature 452, 913 (24 April 2008)
4. Nature 453, 828-829 (2008)

Cloned meat may soon be in your grocery stores. According to the Wall Street Journal, as early as next week, the FDA may give word that food products from cloned animals are okie dokie for human consumption.

Cloning companies are cheering, consumer groups and the European Union are booing and the cows, well the cows are mooing. I had to say it.

Because cloning is so expensive, most of the cloned animals will be used for breeding and it will likely be a couple of years before their offspring start showing up prepackaged and ready to go.

That makes me feel better. Going vegan is starting to look more and more attractive.

What do you all think? Would you eat products from cloned animals or the offspring of cloned animals?