Also interesting, BGI chose to publish in Chinese in what amounts to their own journal rather than in Nature, Science, or Cell.
Does that mean they just made it up? It wouldn't be the first "cloning" thing that somebody faked.
It looks like there's a long, rich history of misrepresentation of fully-grown pig weight.
The actual GHR-defective miniature pigs exist now and didn't before.
It looks like there's a long, rich history of misrepresentation of fully-grown pig weight.
My dear chap, you're absolutely right. Look at what happened at the Shropshire Agricultural Show the year before last. That terrible man Alaric Dunstable absolutely assured everyone that Pride of Matchingham tipped the scales at four hundred and twenty three pounds and I would stake a fiver that --
SHUT UP CLARENCE YOU'RE BLITHERING AGAIN
Maybe the use of "cloning" is throwing me off. If it's like knock-out mice, they aren't actually clones.
That is, the actual living mice are made the old fashioned way (sexually, furtively, behind your cabinet), but the genes implanted have been cloned.
I wish I would stop getting emails for knock-out mice. I've got no use for them and don't have a department purchasing card anyway.
I hear they're a real knock-out.
right, the minipigs are actually descendents of the adults from modified embryos.
My understanding is that, similarly to knockout mice, altered DNA is inserted into an early-stage embryo, with reasonably high probability of zygote viability. Do you mean technically not a clone in the sense that there's no parent with the modified DNA ? If yes, agreed, but I question the utility of so narrow a definition.
Here's a paper describing knock-in mice with this technique:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25123483?dopt=Abstract
I agree that it's a narrow definition, but it's also the common (in both senses) one.
This isn't the CRISPR technique, this is an older technique using TALENs. Here is a comparison of the techniques. CRISPR is much easier to use, because you don't have to construct and clone a new enzyme from many small parts in order to make a new CRISPR. And you don't then have to get that giant protein into the cells you're targeting.
What are the odds on having mini-bears within my lifetime? I've always thought it would be awesome to have a tiny, aggressive mini-grizzly as a pet.
But TALEN is safer than CRISPR if it gets into the general population, I'm given to understand. Doesn't overwrite everything it comes into contact with.
Apparently sun bears are small as 60 pounds. You might get a miniature one by selective breeding.
They take three years to reach sexual maturity and have only one or two cubs at a time, so probably not in your life.
No matter how much we might all pledge ourselves to the tenets of Halfordismo every Sunday, having something in our house that can't be toilet-trained and keeps trying to bite you seems hard to sustain. But you could test it out with other existing small mammals.
I was thinking like maybe 1 pound, 6 inches high. Claws sharp enough to draw a little blood, but you could just watch it get cute-mad, and swat it away when it goes into a mini-grizzly rage. Can CRISPR or TALEN make this happen?
Have they even made a dog that small?
I'd be happy with a bear about the size of a Jack Russel. And I don't see why we need to assume you can't house break one. We just don't know. It's not like anybody has tried much.
My longstanding animal fantasy is either squads of dog-sized permian dragonflies in one of my greenhouses, or Arthropleura, the 2-meter terrestrial centipede.
I thought those required a much more oxygen-rich atmosphere.
But TALEN is safer than CRISPR if it gets into the general population, I'm given to understand. Doesn't overwrite everything it comes into contact with.
I'm not sure it's safer. The issue with CRISPR is that it seems like it's so precisely targeted that soon engineering human embryos will be reliable instead of a "Do 50, 1 might work" proposition. So finally the ethical conundrums will be real instead of theoretical.
On a semi-related topic, and I don't want my bullshit to deter actually knowledgeable people from talking about real science, but ... I had a dream two nights ago that because of concussions the NFL was wrapping itself up as a football league and was transforming itself into a professional "modern" bear-baiting league, and I was asked to represent the new bear-baiting NFL in litigation with animal rights groups.
Aside from bragging about having the best dream ever, (though the dream never clarified what "modern" bear-baiting is) I bring this up because brutal animal sports replacing brutal human ones seems like a plausible use for animal cloning. Maybe?
I think it's more likely that both animal and human brutality will increase together instead of being substitutes. On a related note, Vick is now starting for the Steelers.
Let me reiterate my call for the cloning of the Wrangel Island Pygmy Mammoth. Mammoths the size of very large dogs would be a hell of a lot cooler than anything you can do with a pig other than make bacon, and even that is arguable.
14,21,23: Forget mini-bears. If easy and affordable gene editing is on the horizon, I want a bear-crocodile hybrid.
brutal animal sports replacing brutal human ones seems like a plausible use for animal cloning.
Not quite sure why. If we wanted to bring back bear-baiting, it would be a hell of a lot easier to supply the bears through conventional means (such as farming them) than through cloning, which is ludicrously expensive and still requires you to have a lot of bears around the place to gestate the clones in.
But doesn't cruelty to animals regularly incite huge raging opprobrium while grinding constant systematic cruelty to humans is just ho hum business as usual? Don't think major league bear bating coming back.
I was asked to represent the new bear-baiting NFL in litigation with animal rights groups.
"We're asking you to come in on this litigation because we've heard good things about you as a litigator."
"I hear that there have been allegations of mistreatment?"
"They'll be dealt with by our alligator."
33: If my current job doesn't pan out, there will be.
I feel like 32 is the answer to 31. We're conditioned by Victorian morality or whatever to view bear-baiting as unacceptable but pro football as OK. But if they were genetically cloned mini-bears, or crocodile-robot-bears, or whatever, all of a sudden we're out of the world of traditional sympathy with nature and into a battle of the technically-engineered monsters, and who wouldn't want that?
Be the change you want to see in the world, but only if nothing else is pressing.
25. Yes, sure, but I don't see you lecturing Carlos Slash Danger or whatever his higher-order pseud is about the likely cranial problems of dwarf ursidae.
26. Also germ-line modified crop plants and food animals.
Anyway, when do we get the midget elephants Heinlein promised?
37: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they win.
(though the dream never clarified what "modern" bear-baiting is)
XFL rules, obviously.
I think "modern" bear-baiting consists of one bear vs. one recently-unemployed NFL player in a bear-proof suit. Possibly with a club or spear.
In modern bear-baiting the bears have robot jockeys riding on their backs, like Saudi camel racing. Also, trampolines.
Last night I dreamed I had a medium sized bear as a pet. Forget size, a bear with a dog's temperment would be the best pet ever.
I don't know if it would require breeding or just training, but I would like a species of domesticated, insect-eating birds that will hover around people or parties. Bats, for nighttime.
Genetically engineered dragonflies might be better, because pooping.
There's no demand for bear-baiting; we invented Twitter.
also, at about 3am the other night at someone's party, I met a biochemist who works on CRISPR but who's about to quit because he thinks the French city he lives in is missing a good German or Austrian bakery, and he's going to make it happen.
I didn't ask him if in that case he could find me a spare vial or two of the stuff to experiment with. (Tuck its ears in!)
we invented Twitter.
That was you? I hope you're at least sorry.
46:How about a dog with a dog's temperament that happens to really, really look like a bear?
I think these miniature pigs are great and should be sold as pets - not because I think they'd be especially great pets (I don't think that), but because they would finally put an end to the now less fashionable (but still existing!) "teacup pig" thing, which is genuinely awful.
Granted, it's awful. But selling pigs to people by convincing them that the pig will stay the size of a teacup is also hilarious. Objectively.
49.last I think you're not supposed to feed them after midnight.
27 is still a pretty decent dream tho!
29. We already have pygmy hippos, and no one seems to keep them as pets.
14: mini-bears would at least avoid this problem.
I would enjoy placing lab orders for knock-out mice a lot more if I didn't know that their lives would be unusually nasty brutish and short (though not solitary) even for mice.
I picture them as giant mice with boxing gloves rampaging around the lab, popping post-docs in the face, with their tiny mice eyes all glassy and weird and the way they are.
Did you just start getting so much spam for them that you ordered some just to see what the fuss was?
24: or Arthropleura, the 2-meter terrestrial centipede
That's a really cruel and uncalled-for description.
Roberto Tigro, Eggplant, I would like to join your consortium for the obtaining of miniature pet bears. Please keep me posted.
It seems to me that they should have fewer health issues than pigs bred to be tiny, b/c they have plenty of other ancestors besides the cloned-edited ancestor---i.e. many generations of inbreeding weren't required to increase the density of the gene in the population.
I wonder if they will be used in cognitive science research. It's probably a lot easier to build mazes for mini pigs than full sized pigs.