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Science

Dolly meet Dotty: Pig Cloning 112

Posted by Hemos from the boring-as-hell dept.
Narc writes "A new breakthrough in the cloning process has seen the introduction of 5 baby cloned pigs. Some of the claimed benefits would affect organ transplants such as heart, liver, kidney etc, and also diabetes. Get this tho, one of the pigs has been called Dotcom. I dread to think what names are gonna come up in the future if they have to call one in the first batch 'Dotcom'. I mean, running out of names already... "
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Dolly meet Dotty: Pig Cloning More

Dolly meet Dotty: Pig Cloning

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  • Naming conventions (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, obviously, they should use dotorg instead of dotcom.

    heart.org, liver.org, kidney.org...

  • But Hal, isn't it completely natural for any species to exploit all advantages it has over other species in its environment? A beaver does not own the trees it cuts down and drags over to block a stream. A lion doesn't own the zebra or antelope it eats. We have the benefit of intelligence and fine manipulation, and we've become tool users with a knack for out-competing every other animal out there. By nature's own laws, we won, and they are ours to own.

    Furthermore, propaganda from the meat and dairy industries notwithstanding (and tell me vegetarians don't do the same), we have sort of evolved as omnivores. We eat plants and meat. That you haven't suffered any deleterious effects from your diet after only three years is great, and I hope you continue to enjoy good health, but I have a friend who recently had to drop the strict vegetarian lifestyle after ten years because it had caused her digestive and neurological damage. I doubt all will suffer the same effects, but some will...because we aren't herbivores.

    As dangerous as humans can be to other species in their environment, humans are also the only ones to act compassionately towards the animals they threaten. Wolves and dolphins don't decide to give up the meat in their diet because it isn't fair to the creatures they consume. But some people do. I agree that we shouldn't treat animals cruely. If for no other reason than it would reflect badly on us. However, having been on my share of dairy farms and chicken ranches, it doesn't look like those animals have it so bad. They're fed, sheltered from bad weather (usually), protected from other predators, and have the benefits of a balanced diet and veternary care. Slaughter is usually quick and intended to be painless...a far cry from the death a wild herbivore suffers at the claws and fangs of carnivores.

    Mind you, I'm not trying to attack your lifestyle. I remember the first time as a kid when I played "Put the Chicken Back Together" with a bucket of the Colonel's Original Recipe. To this day I can't stand to eat chicken off the bone. But I do recognize that as a species we eat meat.

    To try to guide this away from seeming to be an attack, would you be willing to eat meat if it were genetically cloned tissue that never even grew on a complete organism? Cloned veal or chicken filets?

  • HAL9000, your message was just fine. Exactly in the spirit I intended mine originally. But boy, do I have alot to respond to!

    Advantage Abuse:
    I believe you're correct in this regard, but wolves apparently do kill for sport. Sheepherders claim that wolves who break into sheep corrals will move from animal to animal, killing each before moving on, without any intent to eat more than one. My point, however, is that no herbivore gets a hearing of its rights by any carnivore. In that sense, the lion certainly "owns" the zebras in its territory. Even if that means just picking one off at a time. Humans alone will look up from a dead bird and toss their bb gun away (sometimes).

    Nature's Competition Over:
    It might have sounded like that, but I don't think so at all. We have to accept that, in all chance, something bigger and smarter will come along to displace us. But we are still the winners so far. If we are careless with our power, we're much more likely to wind up hurting ourselves in the end. My attitude is compassion towards other life, but my justification is enlightened self-interest.

    Vegan Propaganda:
    Oh, I recognize the trouble any minority has getting it's word out. Try being an Amiga user on these boards! But even if Vegans weren't the minority, they'd use exactly the same dismissive techniques the meat and dairy industries use...that's the way large groups tend to operate. The internet helps to break through that, and I imagine it has been helpful to all organizations who are considered "fringe" by the majority.

    Compassion:
    Well, the idea that we are at least compassionate towards the cute animals gives, I think, humans a rung up on the moral high-ground ladder. But the mere existence of people like yourself proves that that empathy goes quite a bit farther, eh? Certainly not in all humans, but a heckuva lot of 'em! We sure are good at making a mess of things, but we'll eventually stop and look at what we've done, and the harm to other species and say, "Gee, we ought to clean this up..." No dam beaver ever looked at its dam dam and gave a dam.

    Private Farms:
    Yep! You've caught me on that one. I read your message and went, "Whoops! I missed that!" There are a number of dairies in my area, all privately owned and very pleasant to visit...when the wind goes the right way. One of my aunts is a chicken rancher (what a wierd image), and my uncle maintains a huge farm that gets into a bit of everything. I've never seen anything especially cruel on any of them.

    Now I have heard about the way veals...I mean...calves are raised. At least some of them. I admit it is pretty hard to justify that kind of cruelty. But I do wonder if the calves are even aware of their situation. Sure, they might know they can't move very far, but if that is the limit of their experience, are they suffering because of it? Frankly, I don't know the answer, but to play devil's advocate (as well as to support my continued consumption of veal), I will submit that the calves are blissfully ignorant of the better life they'd have outside of their cages. And that even if they can neither turn around nor lay down they still don't know any better and so are content until they are slaughtered. (Ick...does evil wash off?)

    Getting Back On Topic:
    Sure technology can make the nutrition available from an omnivorous diet available to vegetarians. Soon they'll probably be able to do that without even killing anything from animalia. That is kind of the point behind my veal-vats question. If we can clone just the part that's good with a marsala wine sauce and it tastes the same and has the same nutritional value, but no animal has died to stock the veal vat (just get a tissue sample from ol' Bess), is this a meat that could then be eaten without remorse by a vegetarian? Frankly, I'd feel much better about it.

    Humans as a species are little kids looking up from the dead bird. We generally do empathize with other living things -- that's why there are groups like PETA and Greenpeace. But I think we're doing more harm than good to ourselves and other animals if we just say right now, "That's it! No more animals for research or food!" We aren't mature enough, technologically or scientifically to do that just yet. In a few decades, though, there might be almost no reason to do so. At that time, I think we'll have grown up enough to toss away the gun. And go home for a big, tasty steak! (Cloned steak, of course.)

  • Actually, Naasking, that ear wasn't honestly growing, it was sculpted out of a substrate and implanted. The substrate functioned as a scaffolding for living cells to form on and replace. It had nothing to do with genetic engineering or cloning. When all was said and done, it was just an advanced, and somewhat macabre, version of plastic surgery.
  • For the 2% of the world who didn't see it. [eliteentertainment.net]

    But nonetheless this is pretty much bogus in a genetic engineering forum as the ear was surgically attached to the mouse in question to give it a place to grow a an implanted cartilage template. The mouse was not genetically manipulated to sprout human ears on reaching puberty or anything :-), merely the host of the paratisical scaffolding

    C.

  • we're cloning pigs to harvest their organs

    Since several thousand years ago, we're farming pigs, chickens, cows, horses, dogs, Guinea pigs, turkeys,... to harvest their organs, muscles, hide, milk, horns...

    Now it's just more patentable.
    --
  • The genetic ~entrepreneurs~ at PreSpam [prespam.com] are trying to clone pigs and naming them after companies. They plan to sell those pigs to the companies for a much substantial price.

    There already are pigs named "Cisco", "Microsoft", "Microsoft Sucks", "Dresdner Deutsche", "Deustche Dresdner", "Disney", "Al Gore", "Al Gore 2000", "George Bush", "George Bush Jr." and others.

    Free software figure Linus Torvalds was shocked after the fact that they claim the rights to name a cloned pig "Linux". Torvalds said "I could admit a penguin, but a pig! I'll check with my lawyers and hit them with all the strength of trademark law".
    President Clinton is consulting his staff about the posibility of a pig named "White House".
    --
  • I think the pig heart thing was a stopgap measure to provide a temporary heart while waiting for a human one to become available. Something that experimental would probably have been done on someone who was so sick that it couldn't have made their chances any worse, so they probably would have died soon afterwards even if the pig heart worked. The columnist Lewis Grizzard lived for several years with a transplanted pig heart valve.
  • I was just reading through this article thinking the exact same thing. Maybe it's a side effect of having pets.

    I can see the organ factories now, harvesting a ripe organ for transplant and shipping the leftovers to oscar-meyer before they rot. I know that there is an organ shortage but with the world population growing at an incredible rate what would it take to keep up with the demand?

    I hope martians don't figure out how to genetically alter humans for their organ transplants...
  • But if you think that's bad, I recall an Ann Landers or Dear Abby column where some lady wanted to know who the hell "Dot Com" was, and why everyone's talking about her.

    I envy the people who don't know who/what "dot com" is.
  • > I don't know about anyone else here, but growing
    > organs in animals is slightly distasteful to me.

    What is distateful is the number of people waiting for an organ.
    I have a card in my wallet which specify that should I die, if it is possible to give my organs to someone else, then be my guest, do it!

    Using organs grown in animals should be less needed if people specified as they lived that they give their organs...
    EVERYONE READING THIS should think about giving its own organs (post-death of course).

    If not, WHY? It won't bother at all! You'll be dead and you'll help someone else...

  • Contrary to what the article says, these are not the first cloned pigs. Virginia Tech has had cloned pigs since shortly after Dolly. After a couple of generations, they have gotten to the point of producing some useful human enzymes in the pig's milk. Additionally, the reason you can clone multiple pigs at a time is that pigs have multiple piglets. It was actually pretty stupid to clone a sheep since they (like humans) usually only have one offspring. Current cloning practices have about a 50% success rate, so it is greatly beneficial to work with pigs (who genetically are not too far from humans).

    Jim
  • Check out the works of Cordwainer Smith. Anything about the "Underpeople", but esp. "The Ballad of Lost C'Mel" and "The Dead Lady of Clown Town". These are short stories, so Nostrillia might be more findable.
    I wouldn't claim that he was accurate, but he certainly talks about possible problems.
  • As some religious headcase said in an earlier post, I know I'll be flamed for this but Truth must be proclaimed.

    HUMANS ARE ANIMALS. They are not vegetables or minerals. Humans gain their distinction from other forms of animal life by having (relatively) high intelligence, opposable thumbs, and language. If we are going to raise animals for spare parts, we should raise humans. For the medical implications of cross-species transplantation, particularly as it pertains to mutation of virii, see the CRT site. [crt-online.org] For the ethical implications think about the fact that a human baby is demonstrably less intelligent than an adult pig. For the moral implications think about human history.
    Once upon a time Victorian naturalists hunted pygmies to be stuffed and displayed in museums (similar displays can still be found at the Mütter Museum [collphyphil.org] in Philadelphia - note the Mütter is not responsible for any atrocities). There was a time when dolphins were considered expendable in the name of cheap tinned tuna. There was a time when people with epicanthic folds were not considered human by "educated" Europeans - note that some of these "scientists" (such as the man who popularized the term Mongoloid for humans with Down's Syndrome) had never met an Asian person.
    Today we think of the racists and specists of the past as ignorant savages. Because we (most of us, that is) have met people of other colors, of other ethnic backgrounds, etc. and know them to be like us, we abhor historical cruelties and hypocrisy.
    Have you ever met an educated, language-using primate? Oh, I forgot, rumor has it most of them were slaughtered for medical research when the grants ran out. There still may be one or two around though. Did you know that pigs are smarter than most primates?
    --Charlie
  • Hmmm. At least I can type. What made you think I'm a hippie? I'm curious since I don't think of myself that way.
    And I wasn't referring to "Planet of the Apes" but rather to the taxpayer-funded grants that were used to teach gorillas sign language. Once the money ran out (according to unconfirmed rumors) the gorillas were reallocated to medical research.
    Oh my god, I actually replied to a reply to one of my posts. I must be slipping. Does anybody have any links to sites showing relative intelligence studies for pigs, dolphins, dogs, etc.? I have stuff in hardcopy only and can't find any active links to any real science.
    --Charlie
  • To reduce the ethical arguments, and some elements of distastefulness... wouldn't it be possible to engineer plants as to grow organs, inside of a fruitlike appendage? The skin of the "fruit" would hold in the necessary moisture, while the plant could be engineered to provide nutrients to a germ cell that is placed inside of the fruit???

    The "fruit" could then be harvested without even killing the plant, or even "picked" during the surgery to maximize freshness.

    It would take a little more work, since plants are a little different that people, but...
  • Won't the DotComGuy (dude living solely on 'net-ordered stuff in Dallas, legally changed his name) get miffed that he's got a sort-of subdomain to a pig? Why not rename the pig to DotComPig. Then you could open up a whole Dilbert naming convention: DotComGirl, DotComDog, DotComKid, etc...
  • It is not pig hearts that are so exciting right now, it is pig livers. Here at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, they have used pig livers as bridge transplants. Take out your liver, hook up a pig liver, not even installed in your body but just floating in a bucket of fluid, and then wait until your donor organ shows up. This has worked pretty good. The nice thing about pigs is that they can be bred (or genitically altered) to achieve better matches.

  • Semi-apropos, there was a piece on Morning Edition this morning about pig cells for dopamine production (as opposed to human fetal cells) to help patients with Parkinson's. However, the results, while remarkable in a couple cases, were not consistent enough to be encouraging.

    Now, if they could clone pigs that grew more human-like brain tissue, it would hold the potential for curing Parkinson's altogether. (Wait, doesn't this tie in to the human genome story, too?)

  • It's not gross, it's a far better way of handling the situation. In the times before civilization, most humans used every bit of an animal that they could. Eat the meat, and make things out of the rest. Clothes out of the hide, tools out of the bone, etc. Then we became "civilized." It became cheaper for us to just take the meat and dispose of the rest unused.

    Now we get to revert a little bit. We'll actually be using more of the animal than we would otherwise. Grill me up some of those Genetically Altered Hot Dogs!

  • Disclaimer: This post is not flame or troll - just my opinion.

    The article says, "Edinburgh-based company PPL Therapeutics hopes such animals will help meet the anticipated demand for pig organs if they are approved for use in human transplants." - It also mentions that the pigs will need heavy modification before use. That will take some time and hopefully by that time the human genome project will be done and someone will have figured out how to grow human organs (I though someone grew skin away from the human body a while back)

    I also thought (will someone correct me if I'm wrong) that the pig heart transplant experiment (or something like) in a human failed... I also would like someone to post the info or a link to the clinical trials that say pig organs could be used for humans in 4 years.

    Overall I think the cloning technique is a big step forward, however, it uses adult cells. What I am interested in is growing two identical copies of a creature that will mature/develope on its own using a simple eggs and sperm. I think that this technique may have the same problem Dolly the Sheep did. - The cloned sheep aged faster. Still it will be interesting to see what happens in the future...

    To quote, "To Pigfinity and Beyond."

  • 1. That really silly RFC on the naming of hosts....<BR>
    2. What kind of name is slashdot? it reduces to /. which is even more content-free than .com.<BR><BR>
  • Something the pig cloners probably did not for foresee is the benefit of animal cloning for the movie industry.

    Another Babe movie? No problem - just whip up another batch of piglet clones and you've got as many animal actors as you need. No more worries about making them all look alike on camera - they already all look alike!
  • "Nobody splicing nothing from Fluffy!"
  • It's the Progressive Image Group, at
    http://www.pig.com [pig.com]
  • > Because we've never done it before now?

    We have done it for thousands of years.

    > Progress is about technological change...

    Is this really progress?!?!?! Our 6 billion and rapidly growing population isn't going to disappear, it's going to be our downfall. ESPECIALLY if modern medicine keeps everyone alive. I'm a product of modern medicine, and wouldn't be here today if it weren't for it, but if I needed a transplant tomorrow, there's no way in hell I would take it if it had anything to do with the slavery/slaughtering of animals. I would accept that it's my time to die, not cheat my way out of it.

    > Next time say "thanks a lot" or "wow, you folks are sure smart" instead.

    You couldn't torture me enought to say that.
  • Psion, thanks for the delightful read! That beaver giving a dam dam part had me rolling....and yes, I think there are some industrial soaps for washing evil off...although I've heard they leave a sticky residue, something about guilt or consience I think :)

    At any rate I think what you've said makes sense. The only part I "had beef" with was the veal section. Whether or not they are blissfully ignorant, it's wrong to treat them that way simply so we can eat tender meat. That is something no other animal does. And you were right about being evil, that's the way it sounds to me as well. The big problem I have, though, is that nobody knows and as a result, they themselves are blissfully ignorant. I think that if everybody in America could see this photo* (see below) [speakeasy.net] and then decide whether or not to dig into their veal meal, a good percentage would opt against it.

    * If you don't want to look it's a calf lying in feces, not able to move, muscles in atrophy.

    So I guess what I'm saying is that maybe both the humans and the animals are ignorant, but only one of the two is blissful. There are some of us (including the two of us) who have thought about these issues, but over half the people I associate with through work, school, etc. never do (maybe I should move? :) It's easier to not think about it. Anyway, thanks for the reason...and the optimism!

    By the way, I was just watching the local "news" (in Philadelphia) and a trailor just bellied up on the highway. It was carrying 10,000 pounds of pig meat, all ruined now. Suddenly I feel sick...
  • First off I want to thank you for a rational argument and for treating me with respect.

    isn't it completely natural for any species to exploit all advantages it has over other species in its environment? A beaver does not own the trees it cuts down and drags over to block a stream. A lion doesn't own the zebra or antelope it eats.

    Yes, but does the lion truly "exploit all advantages" it has over the zebra? Does the lion kill more zebras than it needs, or only enough to survive? When lions are nourished, they are of no concern to zebras and they actually "hang out" more often than the discovery channel documents. the hunts are the exciting part...

    By nature's own laws, we won, and they are ours to own.

    You speak as if nature's competion is over. Why is it that evolution had to stop when civilization began? Also, aren't we being sore winners? Wouldn't the truly civilized winner say "Okay, we won, but we will still allow you to live as you have since your creation." That sounds better to me than "Get off our land, it's ours now!" and "We own you and you will do nothing but provide for us!"

    Furthermore, propaganda from the meat and dairy industries notwithstanding (and tell me vegetarians don't do the same)...

    We do it because we are the minority, and because it actually hurts us to see what goes on around us. We do not do it for profit in currency form.

    We eat plants and meat. That you haven't suffered any deleterious effects from your diet after only three years is great, and I hope you continue to enjoy good health, but I have a friend who recently had to drop the strict vegetarian lifestyle after ten years because it had caused her digestive and neurological damage. I doubt all will suffer the same effects, but some will...because we aren't herbivores.

    Are you saying that the same science that can clone sheep and pigs cannot account for dietary changes?

    As dangerous as humans can be to other species in their environment, humans are also the only ones to act compassionately towards the animals they threaten.

    I see compassion towards dogs and cats, but most definately not towards cows, chickens, pigs, rats, roaches, etc. They're not cute, remember? :)

    I agree that we shouldn't treat animals cruely. If for no other reason than it would reflect badly on us.

    Like what I was saying about us being civilized winners rather than bitter and jaded for no reason.

    However, having been on my share of dairy farms and chicken ranches, it doesn't look like those animals have it so bad. They're fed, sheltered from bad weather (usually), protected from other predators, and have the benefits of a balanced diet and veternary care. Slaughter is usually quick and intended to be painless...a far cry from the death a wild herbivore suffers at the claws and fangs of carnivores.

    Out of curiosity, were you on a private farm (owned by a family perhaps), or on a corporate farm? There is a big difference I've noticed. The one you're describing doesn't sound like the typical corporate farm.

    To try to guide this away from seeming to be an attack, would you be willing to eat meat if it were genetically cloned tissue that never even grew on a complete organism? Cloned veal or chicken filets?

    I personally would probably not eat meat, but I would rejoice if the invention could happen. While it would involve the killing of animals to develop such a process, those animals wouls be martyrs for all who followed them. Even with this, things would not change too much. Humans would still own animals. Even I, as a kid, used to shoot birds in my back yard with a bb gun, not to eat, but because it gave me power. Why? Why was this acceptable?

    I truly am sorry if this reads like flame or a "counter-attack" :)
  • One of the biggest 'eww's that this brings up is the fact that they are growing pigs. Harvesting the guts that they need.. and then there is a carcass that needs to be disposed of.

    Where do you think that the carcass will be going.

    Can anyone say, "Oscar Meyer Weiner"?

    Yum, genetically altered pigs. Now, I realise that I may be being a little naive here. I know that there are genetically altered foods already. I know that people have been selectively breeding crops and animals for tens of centuries.. but come on! THIS IS GROSS!

    Hehe. Almost time to go home.. YIPPEE!

    -=-
  • We have done it for thousands of years.

    no... I was clearly talking about cloning of animals -- and that has not been done for a thousand years, so far as I know. That's why it's news.

    Is this really progress?!?!?!

    Short answer: Yes. Long answer: If you want to die as a result of refusing medical technology, that is certainly your choice, and I respect that (as long as you are consistant by being a vegan as well) and have no quarrel with you. Some of us, however, are in no rush for a premature death when technology exists today that can benefit us. We as humans have a pretty strong instinct for survival -- so I'd say it's progress when we come up with a new method of surviving.

    Our 6 billion and rapidly growing population isn't going to disappear, it's going to be our downfall. ESPECIALLY if modern medicine keeps everyone alive.

    That argument makes no sense... modern medicine and technology has allowed our population to grow to its current levels -- increased longevity, food production methods, efficient production of goods and services -- and I can't see how it's contributing to our downfall at all. In fact, I don't think we are heading towards a downfall at all, but instead the reverse. Our society is more tolerant and peaceful, with more leisure time, and more comforts, and is more available to the general population that any other time in history... and it's a trend that will likely continue well into the future.
  • I mean, come on; we're cloning pigs to harvest their organs. Doesn't this seem just a little creepy?

    Why is that creepy? Because we've never done it before now? YAWN! Progress is about technological change, which can rapidly redefine what is "normal" and make new things seem "creepy" until it is an accepted part of culture.
    BR Here's a question for you: say you desperately need a new kidney (or whatever) to survive, do you really care where it was grown, be it a test tube, a pig, or what? No, you need the organ -- so you take it. That's what these people are doing -- they are doing it to help save your lives -- and you have the nerve to call it "creepy". Next time say "thanks a lot" or "wow, you folks are sure smart" instead.
  • Are they preparing to make pig-human hybrids? They mentioned making the organs less susceptible to immunological rejection and also mentioned knocking out genes. This leads me to think that they might try and replace the pig's MHC alleles with their human analogs. This would be the perfect solution for prevention of rejection. (Of course, pig tissue isn't exactly like human tissue, so it wouldn't eliminate the problem completely, but it's a big step)

    If this technique really works, the complications of rejection would decrease dramatically. You could really have custom organs made. Just let them get a copy of your HLA alleles, plug them into an adult pig genome, and inject it into an enucleated ovum, and you've got a backup system just waiting for you. It might even be better than human transplants with less than perfect HLA matches.

    Of course, I'm sure there are a lot of people who will be quite uncomfortable with combining pig and human DNA. But if it works, isn't it more proof that all earth's creatures are made from the same stuff?

  • I get bacon and heart attack Bucky has a pulse again. (And he can eat the fatty bacon from the pig that saved his life, the pig lives on While this is both a good and a bad thing, I think it is more good. It would enable us to save more lives because we could essentially grow perfect hearts, but it would be more helpful if they could manipulate the genes so that the pig was just any old pig but it had 5 cloned hearts. This way we have 5 healthy hearts and some bacon and pork chops instead of having people flip out about all these pigs that were cloned with a problem in them and since we all at the pig we all have the problem.

    Moderation for Funny and Insightful accepted with gratitude.

  • You're right of course, there is great need for organs and despite the ethics involved it is a worthy pursuit. I would want it myself if I truly needed it.

    However, I was stating that before having seen the mouse on the news(CNN I think), I had no real concept of what they were doing when they were "growing organs". Yet, at every instance this science was mentioned, I what I had read about it.

    My real point was, that most people don't even realize what is involved in this process(myself included) when they spout off the benefits. Seeing that news story opened my eyes.

    To be honest, I don't see the greatest potential for organ growing with animals. There is work being done to grow organs in casings filled with special nutrient enriched gels. The enclosures are shaped like the organ desired, and are injected with a small culture of unspecialised cells(stem cells I think?). The cells are then stimulated to grow and specialise into the desired organ.

    I can see this kind of organ cultivation becoming the preferred method. A lack of ethical issues, as well as the fact that you don't have to wait for the animal to mature before organ cultivation makes it appealing.


    -----
    "I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great ... invisible ... THING ... !"
  • People have studied the effects of separation on identical twins. The thing is, with people at least, that identical twins living together react to each other and try top develop their own identities. Turns out that if you separate twins they develop into really remarkable similar people, right down to what they name their kids sometimes, but if you leave them together they don't. I suppose separation is genetic and non-separation is conditioning.
  • After all these thousands of years of being eaten by humans, being farm grown in cramped smelly unsanitary conditions and inhumanly slaughtered, now they are being bred for organ replacements. We're kind of getting closer to that "you are what you eat" idea, aren't we?

    They had to find an animal that we'd take for granted as "disposable", meaning an animal we already farm and slaughter without thinking and inkling of remorse, and it had to be an animal that would not be too far from humans genetically, but not so close that it would make most people repulsed at the thought of the transplant.

    I don't know why they even bother to give names to the pigs, which kind of anthropomorphize them. Just give them some serial numbers. Because after all, our purpose for them (okay, not this first batch, but eventually) is terribly inhumane. I mean, all the pigs and chickens and cows raised to provide us with meat, do we have names for them? Do we go to the restaurants and the waiter bring us our steak and say "here you are, this is Elsie"?

    The amazing thing about all this research into organ transplants is that people don't realize that all these organ transplants would not be necessary if we just take better care of our bodies. We'd save a lot of money in health care, and would probably never have to get into this quandry. The existing human organs would probably suffice. The modern western diet (American diet more so than any other) is terrible for our health. We persists in curing symptoms of disease whereas we should be healing the body by proper diets, etc.

    that's just my 2 cents.

  • Of course there will still be needs for organ transplants for those situations. I just think that nowadays, a lot of organ problem stems from health reasons. People who drank a lot would more likely need a liver transplant, eating foods that are too rich in animal fats and lack of exercise, smoking, etc., will cause heart problems, and may necessaitate heart transplants. Could these things be avoid with a proper diet? I would say most of them can.

    And note that I didn't say dieting, which is more associated with losing weight than anything else, but as in a proper diet, eating balanced meals. being smart about what you eat, and avoid overindulgence. They are not cures, you are correct. But if you eat properly, you wouldn't need as much 'curing'!

    Nor did I ever claim that a proper diet is a 'miracle cure'. All I am saying is that a lot of diseases stem from a poor imbalanced diet. Too much McDonald's, pizza, sodas, drinking, smoking, etc., will always be bad. Who pays for the overindulgence of individuals when they need organ transplants? If your loved ones are in an accident and need an organ transplant, but cannot get one for months because there's shortage, and the shortage is because of many people needing them from not treating their bodies properly, you may think a little different about the whole diet thing.

  • Man was created in God's image. Animals were not.
    Man is the only living being with an eternal soul.
    Man is the only living being with moral choice and free will.

    I'm gonna get flamed for this, but Truth is Truth, and must be proclaimed.

  • Er, ethics aside many things are possible. Wanna do them all?
    .oO0Oo.
  • its the year 2525, and now what? we have pissed off cloned pigs used as organ banks, super advanced AI beowolf clusters, our own legendary human stupidity, and who knows what else...

    the time is ripe for the pigs to team up with the AI, enslave humanity, and start cloning us to be usee as food and spare parts for the pigs and batteries for the machines...

    i cant wait.

    .sigs are dumb!

  • Personally, I've always been waiting for the day when we'd be able to just set up "meat factories". Rather than going through all the trouble of raising animals, just have vast indoor fields of meat. I'm still waiting... Imagine: Cow-less steaks a meter cubed for $25.

    Obviously there's reasons why we're not doing it today. But who's to say we'll never come up with a good way to just grow insane amounts of meat without needing the animals? (We could even zap them with electric charges to stimulate the muscle growth, rendering the otherwise sedentary meat powerful and muscular [and yummy!]... just a thought. ;)

  • I'm sure they'll be grown in sterile laboratory enviroments. These aren't your standard bacon pigs, after all - I'm sure they'll be very expensive and looked after closely.
  • Now there's a case of psychotic revenge I wouldn't like to be the target of.
  • If thats the case, anybody coming anywhere near my dog with a syringe will be walking away with it jammed up their butt. Assuming they can walk while their body is it two parts after I snap them in half that is.
  • maybe they will just get someone to clone them after you snap them in two.
  • Instead of dotcom, how about
    1) Market
    2) Home
    3) Roast Beef
    4) None
    5) WeeWee
    All of which also serve as plausable insertions in the sentence "What drives the World today is the American (blank)" with option 4 being none of the above. :)
  • Just think about the new names that Ralph Nader proposed. It could have been Dotsucks.

    kwsNI
  • What a great concept. I can see the conversation now.

    Monica: Mr. President, I'd like you to meet my clone. She's exactly like me in every way, only one eigth my size.
    Frau: Bring in the CLONE!
    Bill: I shall call her... Dotsucks.

    kwsNI

  • Pigs are supposed to be one the the best animals to take a direct animal organ transplant from, and it is said that it is VERY easy to grow extremely human compatible organs in them.

    Slashdot would have been a better name though...
  • Well, it could have been worse, another .Gov.

  • All we need to do now is clone Jeff Bezos and let him patent himself into obscurity.
  • I thought that it was impossible to clone humans, or especially cops. I mean they did clone a pig right? Ohhhhh! Ooops, maybe I should cut back on the tokity tokity.
  • I remember when Dolly was first created. 2 weeks later I participated in a debate about cloning and why I think it is one of our worst

    "inventions/discoveries." We are talking about the possibility of Boys From Brazil happening again. If you haven't read that book, it deals with the attempt to clone Hitler in South America after WWII, and the things that occured (blue eyes in people who are supposed to have black, etc, etc).

    Anyway, due to the possibilities that can occur because of cloning, it is a horrible mistake. I have done some research on this, sorry I don't have the data available on me anymore, but the scientific devices that were used to make Dolly are readily available to anyone who wants it. Do you really think that they are going to be able to keep the secret of cloning from people.

    And the psychological damage that can occur. This human was genetically created because your "True Self" knew that he had a bad heart and would need a new one in the years to come, so now we are going to take your heart (which is really his) and put it in his, and let you die.

    WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Again, this is some of the gravest news possible. I hate the idea of this. Fine, we'll come up with cures for all the diseases, but how many people know how many sheep dies before Dolly was "created." There were roughly a thousand dead sheep prior to Dolly. A THOUSAND. Animal cruelty.

    I don't believe that Life (advanced life form..eg animals) was supposed to occur in a Petri Dish, and it still isn't!

    Like many things that occur naturally, diseases is one of them. They are there and we have to deal with them. It is not our place to play Mother Nature. These diseases are there as a way of population control and Darwinism effect. Anyone remember Darwin? Yeah, evolution as we know it is being put into question here. We are attempting to control evolution. Because of what we are trying to do, control the uncontrolable, the gravest of things will happen. From the great mathematical theory, Chaos Theory, this can result in a complete disaster, and I am looking forward to this event. This little start to cloning will result in a mass attempt for ego-centric people to clone themselves, pay highly for it too, also leaders of countries will attempt this. Countries which are looked upon by the US as dangerous countried (Middle East, Pakistan, India, China...anyone but the US). Something this small can result in something ver large and out of proportion

    So in the end of this long and rambling passage (I wish I could have made it cleaner, but I don't have my research anywhere near me), I would just like to state the Cloning is one of the worst things that can ever happen.

  • That comment just sickens me. I am liberal, and I eat pig, and I do love meat. Nothing wrong with that, but do you don't find killing one THOUSAND pigs before coming out with one living pig wrong? I do think that there is something wrong with that. Also, we must realize...this isn't "True" life. We are "growing" life from a laboratory. It happens to pigs, it can happen to humans. You eat humans? Maybe it's a different perspective, but according to you, killing a pig is the same as eating a pig...so when we attempt to clone humans and watch the first fifty, or a hundred die...does that mean that we might as well have eaten fifty or a hundred humans?

  • And, granted, they say they wouldn't use primates even though they'd be a better match because they can only reproduce one-at-a-time...

    I think it's mainly because pigs have been domesticated so long and we're sure they don't carry too many unknown diseases and viruses like primates do.

  • I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I want to be happy that we have a possible temporary solution to the "organ shortage." On the other hand, the whole thing is a little creepy. I mean, come on; we're cloning pigs to harvest their organs. Doesn't this seem just a little creepy?

    And, granted, they say they wouldn't use primates even though they'd be a better match because they can only reproduce one-at-a-time... but, of course, the best match would be humans. Sure, it may not be possible today, or maybe even not in the near future, but is it really impossible to imagine cloning people for their organs?

    Okay, so maybe cloning humans just for organs would be inefficient. If we could clone just organs... that would be something. I've heard something about growing an ear in a petri dish or somesuch, so I'm sure we'll eventually be able to grow kidneys or hearts or spleens (whatever those do).

    I think next we should work on cloning chihuahuas so everyone can have a talking dog. I mean, they all really talk, right? It's on TV, it must be true.

  • By now it is a well known fact that pigs can be an intermediate for diseases between animals and humans. Most of the different flu's are coming out of China. New flu variants have their origin in birds, and those birds can infect pigs. The pigs can infect humans. Isn't there an increased risk of infectuous diseases if they use pigs for transplant organs??
  • Ummm - that's not really the same thing they're talking about here. The benefits they're talking about are on the order of figuring out how to take liver cells from you and grow them quickly into a new liver so that you can get a transplant before you die of liver failure.

    I saw that thing, too (was it on 20/20 or CNN?), and that was a much cruder version of what they've got now. The idea is to make it so they don't have to use a host animal to grow the new organ.

    --
    Ethan Baldridge

    The only reason I keep my Fat32 partition around is so I can mount it like the bitch it is.
  • At some point soon some changes are going to have to be made. If simple lineage is accepted as the dividing factor, nothing with more pig genes than human would count as human, I would think. There might be issues over percentage of genes, but the end result would be... disaster.

    Visualize a world in which intelligent slaves are common - so long as less than X% of their DNA can be identified as human, they aren't.

    What if we do accept intelligence as the dividing factor? What elements define humanity? There is already a precedent for accepting genetic defects that result in individuals who cannot even manage to care for themselves. Would we dismiss our own offspring as human if they failed these tests? I can't say what is right in this case.

    What if we advanced the art to the point that the organ could be grown without a complex organism's hosting body? Would a heart (100% human DNA) get treated as human? I seriously doubt it. What of a full body minus brain? Much harder to say.

    And it doesn't end there... eventually, computers will be capable of passing a turing test. When a computer can convince any of us that it is human, do we accept it as such? It may not be, yet, but I fear the day that we have sapient software, and keep it enslaved.

    None of which is reason to stop the research. If we don't go forward with this out of fear, we may find that we are slowly going backward.
  • I don't understand what all the big hoo-hah is about human cloning. It's been going on as long as there have been humans. I read an article a couple of years ago, where a guy was saying this. He said, "I have a clone -- I call him my twin brother. And I can assure you, we are not the same person!" Cloning Hitler would not give you another Hitler. A person is more than the sum of their parts.


    --
  • did they use good cops or bad cops? don't we have enough already?
    Hey, if someone can find a cop with a sense of humor, I vote we clone him/her!
  • I love that movie!
    "Have you ever met an educated, language-using primate? Oh, I forgot, rumor has it most of them were slaughtered for medical research when the
    grants ran out. There still may be one or two around though. Did you know that pigs are smarter than most primates?" -wasn't that "escape from the planet of the apes"

    Stupid hippie.
  • You know I think if very interesting that no one has brought any religious aspects into this. I guess I will since no one else has attempted it. First of all, I don't want anyone thinking that I am going to bend any truth or that I sacrifice truth for religion. I am a biochemist and science is very important to me. I am also a Christian and feel that these views should be touched on in this matter, especially pertaining to the vegan beliefs.

    I. First I feel I should bring up that I have never met an intelectually honest Christian Vegan. I don't know that there are any out there. I believe this to be caused by the fact that the Christian beliefs put humans ABOVE animals in every aspect. God made us special compared to his other creations. He gave us a soul and cared for us above all others. The first thing you're probably going to say to this is that if God put us in charge of animals, we should take care of them. This is of course true, but he values us over them and for this reason it is better that animals die than people. It is better to raise an animal for organs and kill it to save a human than to let that human die.

    II. God is not a Vegan.
    Not only does He intend us to eat animals, but in the Old Testament times, He required that animals be sacrificed to Him as gifts and symbols of our recognition of His Ultimate authority as well as signs of His future sacrifice of His son for our sins.

    III. Does this give us the right to torture animals for no or little gain? No, it is still our responsibility to watch over God's creation.
    Does this mean we should put animals above ourselves or even on our level? No, we were made special by God in His image (understand this is more a spiritual image than physical) and were given souls like no other being ever.

    IV. Finally I'll conclude.
    As a Christian and a scientist, I feel that growing organs for humans in animals has basically no down-side that compares to the benifit of saving a human life. The methods for growing these organs should be without torture to the animals, however, for we are their caretakers. This is probably one of the greatest medical oppertunities to come along since the vaccine.

    I hope you all understand what I have said. If I have somehow offended someone, please understand that it was entirely unintentional. These are my true beliefs and what I have found to be most true in my heart and through the science I know and live.
    Thank you.
    GiGabyte02
  • Just be glad they didn't call the pig "/.". I mean, the pig runs at 400 MPH, speaks intelligently saying that people are either insightful or informative and ocasionally offtopic, and for some unknown reason just stops midstride, falls over, and becomes completely comatose once a week. But, we just accept this. "There is nothing wrong with the pig, and we're working to fix it as fast as possible." ;)
  • It's not IF the patient will die, the point is WHEN the patient will die. As someone else mentioned, the point was to extend the life long enouh fo a donor to be found.

    The line that bothered me more was the point about higher primates being a better match but pigs being more morally acceptable. Sure, hack apart a "meat" animal that you don't have a problem sending the rest to the slaughter house but don't think about raising something we might identify with for the process. I keep flashing back toi the Hithchicker's Guide where the meat animal in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe marketted it butt off, literally. It would be so much more acceptable to mutate it into something grown in an artificial womb with no other organs/body parts so you could just pluck it out as having no othe purpose...

  • It's good to see this kind of stuff finally happening. I realize that many people find cloning and genetic engineering distasteful. I find it a little queasy myself. But I'm sure that I will feel different when I'm 84 and I can buy a heart transplant for a thousand bucks. (which will probably won't even buy a gallon of gas by then :).

    Manipulating and replicating genes is just another technology. It can be used for good or (my fav) for evil. Passing legislation to stop or retard it is not the answer. If we don't create this technology someone else will. And then we won't even get the benefits. Eventually, all people will want this technology and I, for one, would like to be in the driver's seat instead of standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride.

    I do not fear genetic engineering. I fear the lack of it.

    - joshy
  • You think christening a pig with a dotcom moniker is bad, read the article that Salon had yesterday, "Thoroughly modern eMillie [salon.com]". Perhaps the most amusing -- or disgusting -- is the reference to the legal battle with Apple over the name "iMack".
  • I also thought (will someone correct me if I'm wrong) that the pig heart transplant experiment (or something like) in a human failed... I also would like someone to post the info or a link to the clinical trials that say pig organs could be used for humans in 4 years.
    • Various pig transplants, usually not bigger than heart valves (excuse me for my bad english here) have been attempted first in the 60-es when the heart surgery was just emerging and they all failed.
    • There are few new developments that show that there are some chances in making the pig tissue more antigen neutral. The problem is that these do not go further than tissue.
    • The experiment in cloning pigs is supposed to be a preliminary in bridging these two
    My 0.02$
  • Things heretofore never considered:

    Pig name squatting.

    sci.bio.cloning.pork.pork.pork

    "how much is that kidney in the window? Pork! Pork! Pork! The one with the dotcom in it's name?"

    "Kerrrrmmmiiiit!!!!! Haaaaaaayyyyyyyyahhhhh!!!" in stereo.

    With this, and genetic engineering, I just might live long enough to see PIGS FLY! I dread the though of all those promises I'd have to live up to.

    Flying pigs? And you thought Seagulls made a mess on your windshield..

  • Better make sure that no remnant of your dog is left around, either. Your dog's DNA could be extracted (theoretically) from its feces, urine, hairs, saliva, blood, etc.
  • Where is the dividing line between human and animal?

    Simple. Animals don't genetically modify other animals.

  • Actually, there are already places where you can store your pet's DNA samples so that at some point in the future when cloning is cheaper and legal, you will be able to create a new clone of your pet after he/she has died.
  • It's a crime that one of them wasn't named IPO. Especially given the financial model.
  • I am sure even a perfect diet wouldn't stop all cases of organ transplantation. There's still accidents (no diet can fix those) and hereditary (sp?) problems. Organ transplants will still be necessary for a long time. It is however true that the 'western' diet isn't the healthiest of diets, but saying diet is a miracle cure? I don't think so. diets can help your health in a major way (don't believe me? live on only french fries for a year, add mayonaise to taste), but they are not cures.

    //rdj
  • They could have named it Dotedu. Or Dotnet. Actually, I kinda like dotnet. Or Dotcouk. It's a good thing that TLD isn't enforced, or it would have to be named Dotcomus (which brings up the topic of 70's obscure pagan folk music, but that's another story ;-) Or they could have named it gnarphlager.

    I should stop. I'm having way too much fun with this.

    That'll do, pig, that'll do
  • Are you a vegetarian?

    From the pig's point of view, is havng its organs implanted in a person any different from being eaten?
  • Various pig transplants, usually not bigger than heart valves (excuse me for my bad english here) have been attempted first in the 60-es when the heart surgery was just emerging and they all failed.

    Hmmm....I don't think they all failed. I have a coworker who has one (a pig heart valve). (From the last ten years, I assume.)

    (Or did you mean anything bigger than a heart valve failed? If so, nevermind.)

  • > Would your opinion change tomorrow if you found out that your liver was failing and the only way to survive was to have a pig's liver transplanted into you? I'm guessing you wouldn't (BICBW).

    There are some people who would, myself included. If my kidney were failing as of right now, I wouldn't be too ecstatic, but I would also accept that it is my time to go (even though I'm far from religious...?) My father has MS and is on all kinds of test drugs that "require" the laboratory slaughter of mice. If i were in his situation I would get accupuncture and possibly even pot for the pain.

    Now, I am a vegan/animal rights activist, so I'll do my bit here. My feeling is that, in the broad scope of time, humans did happen to become the first intelligent-enough species on earth to have civilization and agriculture. But that doesn't mean we should rule the world. We do not own animals and most people would agree with me there I think. Since we don't own them, how else can one articulate the way we treat them? We subject them to highly unnatural conditions for no other reason than being to our benefit. Not only do we think we own animals, but we're ruthless owners 100 times worse than the very worst of slave owners.

    I don't like to put the blame on individuals, partly because I used to be the same way. The blame goes on the the meat industry, the dairy industry, the fast food industry, etc. The meat industry makes us think meat is healthy, when it is far from it. I've been meat free for 3 years now and never had any problems with protein or anything. I also have a lack of motivation so I didn't even do any special research on my diet, don't take any vitamins, and so on. The dairy industry makes us think milk gives us strong bones with the calcium surplus. We don't need milk any more than a weened cow needs milk. It is for newborn calfs! Calfs that double their body weight in their first week of life. Milk is not needed by any human on earth. The fast food industry teaches us to not think about where our food comes from. Every time one gets a 39 cent cheeseburger from McDonald's, a cow has been mistreated (the milk in the cheese and bread), then killed. This "little sidenote" doesn't even occur to the masses, including me when I ate meat. Bah bah bah, that's what they want us to do, and that's exactly what we do.
  • "It's not IF the patient will die, the point is WHEN the patient will die."

    So this process, then, strips the patient of his natural immortality, I presume? ;)

    --

  • Apart from the fact the mice were bred to have no immune system in order not to reject the ear.

    On an aside, one of the members of the team used to be friends with my SO. He went to art school after that, studying design Central StMartins because his main aim in life was growing music equipment and TV's...

  • "A new breakthrough in the cloning process has seen the introduction of 5 baby cloned pigs. Some of the claimed benefits would affect organ transplants such as heart, liver, kidney etc, and also diabetes."

    Let's not forget that this will also mean increased ham and bacon production. To quote Homer Simpson, "Mmmmmm...cloned meat products *drool*"

    "Get this tho, one of the pigs has been called Dotcom. I dread to think what names are gonna come up in the future if they have to call one in the first batch 'Dotcom'. I mean, running out of names already..."

    Christ, this whole damn "dotcom" shit is getting out of hand! First we have that Mr. Dotcom nerd in Dallas shacking up for a year, and now we're naming pigs dotcom. Yeesh!

    But if you think that's bad, I recall an Ann Landers or Dear Abby column where some lady wanted to know who the hell "Dot Com" was, and why everyone's talking about her.

    *shakes head*

  • I am a student at Vanderbilt university, and I am personally interested with the ethics and practicality of cloning and genetic engineering for commercial gain. However, I believe that this new cloning technique is far, far more valuable than just that.

    One of the more interesting things about these pigs is that there are FIVE of them. With Dolly the sheep, the cloners had to try over and over as most of the cloned sheep embryos never made it to birth. The fact that they have five pigs that appear to be the same "age" tells me that either they burned a ludicrious amount of money to get five identical pigs at an efficiency rate comparable to Dolly's or that they developed a new technique that raises efficiency enough such that they only had to use several adult female pigs to give birth. Or even that they (gasp!) had them in the same litter; i.e. they were birthed by the same sow. If it IS a dramatic hike in efficiency, this advancement begins to dull some of the ethical argument of "an embryo is a person too" against human cloning and human cloning research.

    Also, these pigs are the ultimate nature vs. nuture scientific tool. In the case of Dolly, they had one sheep that was genetically identical to another adult. In the case of these pigs, they have multiple pigs with exactly the same genetic makeup. A litter of pigs with the same genetic makeup could be bred and experimented with by the scientific community. As a previous poster has mentioned, this eliminates one of the variables -- if the natures of a set animals can be held constant, the nutures can be varied and studied. Before now this has not been possible. The importance of nature vs. nuture cannot be overemphasized, as it is a debate that has been raging ever since it was known that genes affect how the body grows and develops. Are we shaped more by our genetic makeup or by the way in which we are raised?

    Here at Vanderbilt there is a discussion and debate this afternoon that asks the question "Are we playing God with our genes?", and I plan to bring these pigs into the discussion. This could be interesting ;)

    Brandon Nuttall

  • Where is the dividing line between human and animal?

    A pig with a few genes modified to make its, say, heart, more appropriate for xenografting (sharing between species) is, obviously, still mostly a pig.

    Take the same pig, modify more genes to make the skin easily graftable. It, I suppose, is still mostly a pig.

    Continue the modifications. At what point are we, literally, killing humans to harvest them for organs?

    I cannot imagine that intelligence would be the dividing factor. Even if Fred couldn't make an intelligent contribution to Slashdot (;->), you don't have the right to kill Fred for his organs.

    So... what -is- the dividing factor between man and animal?

  • This Just In From The APWire (Score:3)

    by dougman ( 908 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @04:44AM (#1204009)
    (AP - New York) - Marketing executives from Microsoft online presence MSN announced today another big publicity/ad campaign stunt featuring a "living online" experience. In this experiment, a newly cloned pig named DotComPig will be given a swank Upper East Side apartment, and survive solely on goods purchased online.

    When asked how the pig would be trained to surf the web, much less put up with the frequent lag times and error pages generated by MSN, marketing worm Brad Sythe exclaimed "He's a fucking pig! We're just going to carve him up and use him for catering at the wrap party afterward anyway! Jeez!".

    The new ad campaign is expected to begin next week.

  • The Spanish transplant system (Score:3)

    by Pseudonymus Bosch ( 3479 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @05:21AM (#1204010) Homepage
    While organs from animals may help in the future, you could check the mechanisms that allow Spain to have one of the highest rates of donors and transplants in the world now at the Organización Nacional de Trasplantes [www.msc.es]
    --

  • Tellomere Depletion and Lifespan (Score:3)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @05:02AM (#1204011)
    I've heard that the tellomere's on Dolly are much shorter than normal and likely to lead to a shorter lifespan. (I'm sure you know that Tellomere DNA is the junk at the end of the chromosomes which make them more robust to copying).

    When I heard this an idea struck me - why not create pets by repeated cloning of an animal - so that the lifespan of the pet is short enough that pets can really be 'just for christmas'.

    This idea gets better when you look at the meat industry - you can make you animals live just long enough to reach full size and then die. That way nobody has to kill them in the Slaughterhouse, they just hop onto the conveyor belt and pass away peacefully and naturally.

    ;-)

  • Re:could be worse (Score:3)

    by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @05:09AM (#1204012) Homepage
    They could have named it Dotedu. Or Dotnet. Actually, I kinda like dotnet. Or Dotcouk.

    Well, given that Dotcom is destined to be such a famous pig, I think it was very short-sighted to give it a name that you haven't claimed a hostname for. Take Dolly The Sheep. Or rather, don't, since dollythesheep.com is already taken (as is clonesheep.com).

    Yes, these poor pignamers did face a challenge, since all of the following are already taken:

    1. dotcom.com
    2. dotcom.net
    3. dotcom.org
    4. com.com
    5. com.net
    6. com.org
    7. net.com
    8. net.net
    9. net.edu
    10. net.org
    11. edu.com
    12. edu.net
    13. edu.edu
    14. edu.org

    Yes, com.edu is actually available. Now, the coolest name for the pig would have been dotdot. Dotdot.com is taken, but dotdot.edu is not, and we could pretend that this whole project has some educational or academic purpose...

  • Effects on sociology/genetics argument (Score:3)

    by Phizzy ( 56929 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @04:44AM (#1204013)
    I wonder how all this cloning business will affect our current views on the age old argument about whether Environment or Genetics has more effect on the personality/psyche of animals and humans. If we can have animals with exact-match DNA, then we have a control group an experimentation group that are identical and reduce our equation to one variable. Take one pig from DNA group A and one from DNA group B and have them reared by mother Pig A and mother Pig B, and have mother C raise two pigs from Group A, and D raise two from group B.. you get the idea. I bet findings regarding the interactions of animals with different DNA as opposed to the same DNA would be very interesting from a sociology point of view. One of my old teachers always used to say that we are 100% our genes and 100% our environment, and I think that would be supported by these studies, but it would be interesting to see some real results now that we can have a perfect test group. Just a thought.

    //Phizzy

  • Disappointed.. (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @06:14AM (#1204014) Homepage Journal
    This actually confirms that Sun's support people are a bunch of pig-fuckers! After all, Sun did put the dot in Dotcom.. I just hope it was in Kentucky, because otherwise Scotty is going to end up playing Cell Block 4's own personal Dotcom for the next three-to-five..

  • Growing organs (Score:3)

    by naasking ( 94116 ) <naasking@nosPam.gmail.com> on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @04:34AM (#1204015) Homepage

    I don't know about anyone else here, but growing organs in animals is slightly distasteful to me.

    I know it could have huge benefits, but after having seen a bald mouse with a human ear growing on its back, I'll never approach this subject with the same preconceptions.


    -----
    "I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great ... invisible ... THING ... !"

  • Re:Growing organs (Score:3)

    by aliastnb ( 155659 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @04:48AM (#1204016)
    > I don't know about anyone else here, but growing organs in animals is slightly distasteful to me.

    That's as maybe, but you cite only one example- the mouse with the ear on its back. This is an example I'm assuming most /. readers will have seen. However, there is a world shortage of suitable transplant organs. Ethics aside, this is one of the few ways that the organs people need are going to be available (at least in the next twenty years or so).

    Would your opinion change tomorrow if you found out that your liver was failing and the only way to survive was to have a pig's liver transplanted into you? I'm guessing you wouldn't (BICBW).

    The majority of the world's population already depends on animals- in the form of food. All this is is taking that one stage further. I believe that the growing of organs for humans in animals is inevitable , if simply to allow for better healthcare. A sideshot of this may be that the black market in organ transplants vanishes (or is significantly reduced).

    Sure, it's a long way off but if we don't try, who knows what we won't achieve?

    --

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