Endnotes
1. In 2005, Gong’s team announced that they had successfully used GFP to create medaka – another species of small fish native to Asia – that did indeed turn green when they were exposed to environmental estrogens, synthetic chemicals that can disrupt the hormones of humans and other animals. In 2010, scientists at China’s Fudan University achieved a similar breakthrough with zebrafish. Despite these advances, South Korea, host of the 2010 G20 Summit, took a far cruder approach when it employed a school of security fish to protect the world’s leaders from contaminated water: If the goldfish swimming around in tanks of the water died, well, that might indicate a problem.
2. Not all aesthetic alterations are created equal. Scientists have created beagles that turn ruby under ultraviolet light – by transferring a sea anemone gene into the dogs – but these GloDogs, as it were, are disturbing to gaze upon. They would surely be a harder sell than GloFish, perhaps because cough-syrup red is a colour that never naturally occurs in the canine kingdom. Since nature itself has created some fish that are red and orange, however, artificially adding one of these hues to an aquarium resident doesn’t seem so jarring.
3. Another company, Lifestyle Pets, already sells what it claims are hypoallergenic cats. The cats, which go for nearly $7,000 a pop, are not products of direct genetic manipulation. Instead, the company says it has merely identified and bred cats with a natural mutation in Fel d 1. However, it remains unclear whether Lifestyle Pets has truly cracked the hypoallergenic code; controversy has long swirled around the company and its scientific claims.
4. We’ve also saddled dog breeds with all sorts of inherited diseases, and the bulldog has been pushed so far by human selection that it is literally handicapped. The breed’s massive head doesn’t fit through the birth canal, and pups are usually born via cesarean section. Their snouts are so short that the dogs can barely breathe – they suffer from sleep apnea and a lifetime of oxygen deprivation. These breathing difficulties also mean that the animals have trouble regulating their own body temperature, and many suffer early deaths from respiratory or heart failure. ‘If bulldogs were the products of genetic engineering, there would be protest demonstrations throughout the Western world, and rightly so’, James Serpell, the director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, once wrote. ‘But because they have been generated by anthropomorphic selection, their handicaps not only are overlooked but even, in some quarters, applauded’.
5. Yorktown Technologies conducted ‘comprehensive’ studies of the glowing tetra, Blake says, which revealed that the fluorescent tetra were less environmentally fit – and thus less likely to survive in the wild – than their unmodified counterparts. The company submitted this data to the FDA, which raised no objections to sale of the tetra, Blake says.
6. US regulators did not approve the drug until 2009 – lagging behind their European counterparts.
7. Scientists have also created genetically modified plants and bacteria that can produce some of these compounds. In fact, insulin produced by modified bacteria became the first genetically engineered drug approved by the FDA in 1982. But many human proteins are complex – in order to work, they have to be folded correctly and adorned with special molecules – and animal cells are better than plants and bacteria at putting these finishing touches on a protein.
8. Microinjection has traditionally been the most commonly used technique for creating a transgenic animal, but it is not the only one. Scientists can also use modified viruses to infiltrate embryos and deliver transgenes. Alternately, they can insert a new gene into embryonic stem cells growing in the lab. These cells are then injected into an embryo; as the foetus grows, the adulterated stem cells will develop into tissues containing the new gene.
9. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of hunting, wild animals and childbirth.
10. Murray and Maga haven’t quite decided what the distribution system will be should the goat milk make it onto the market, though Maga says they probably won’t sell the transgenic goat technology, or the rights to the milk, to a pharmaceutical company. Instead, she says, she and Murray have discussed partnering with a nonprofit organization to parcel out the milk.
11. While the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) issues an annual report on the number of animals used in research, it chooses not to break down animal usage by genetically modified status.
12. Not all such transplants were for life-threatening conditions. Take the popular procedure pioneered by the French surgeon Serge Voronoff. In the 1920s, he began performing an operation that he believed would keep ageing men feeling young and vibrant. All an elderly man had to do was get a thin slice of ape or monkey testicle sewed inside his scrotum. Thousands of men all over the world underwent the procedure, which was so popular that Voronoff worried about having enough animals to meet demand. (Learning that Voronoff also transplanted monkey ovaries into ageing women is the first thing that has ever made me feel grateful to live in the age of Botox. Suddenly, injecting botulinum toxin into my face doesn’t sound so bad.)
13. In the popular media, and public discussion, any creature that is part human and part animal is often referred to as a ‘hybrid’, but technically, a human-animal hybrid is a very specific kind of creature: one created by fertilizing an animal egg with a human sperm (or vice versa). The most infamous attempt to create such a hybrid came courtesy of the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov. In 1927, Ivanov tried to impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm, but when that didn’t yield any tiny human-zees, he formulated a new strategy: He would inseminate Soviet women with sperm from Tarzan, a twenty-six-year-old orangutan. Happily for the women of the USSR, Ivanov was captured by the secret police before he could carry out this plan.
14. Similarly in the US, the National Academy of Sciences has issued guidelines stipulating that any experiment that might cause human cells to end up in animal brains must have a strong scientific rationale to be approved.
15. That said, culture does play a role in how we view these human-animal combos. African scientists and policymakers have warned Murray and Maga that their transgenic goats may not be popular in certain African nations. In some cultures, the researchers were told, people would view the single lysozyme gene as enough to make the goats partly human and would consider consuming any part of those creatures to be a form of cannibalism.
16. There’s been some confusion about this name over the years, with many news outlets reporting – erroneously, according to Westhusin – that CC stands for ‘Copy Cat’.
17. The European Food Safety Agency also reviewed the scientific data and reached similar conclusions about the health risks faced by cloned livestock.
18. Some years ago, Kraemer tells me, ‘a zoo brought a pair of lion cubs into the clinic and they only wanted one of them back’. So, until A&M could build a suitable facility for her, Delilah the lion lived in the Kraemers’ back garden.
19. Errors in genetic reprogramming may also alter gene activity in a clone and account for differences between a clone and its genetic donor.
20. Several experts have gone so far as to suggest that the secret to the South Koreans’ success is the nation’s appetite for dogs. Since the failure rates are high, a successful cloning attempt requires lots and lots of canine embryos. The Koreans have an advantage, some have said, because they have access to more dogs – and can harvest eggs from the canines being farmed or sold for their meat.
21. Hwang has also been accused of fraud in connection with his claim, in 2004, of having cloned human embryos. (He was ultimately convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but not of fraud.) Hwang reportedly admitted to falsifying data, and two of his landmark papers were retracted. His dog data, however, appears to be legitimate. (A spokesperson for BioArts defended the company’s association with Hwang to The Guardian: ‘As a cloning company’, he said, ‘we believe in second chances’.)
22. The winner of the Golden Clone Giveaway was James Symington and his German shepherd Trakr, a search-and-rescue dog who worked the rubble of the World Trade Center in September 2001. Symington eventually received five clones of Trakr and founded Team Trakr, a nonprofit that will send teams of search-and-rescue dogs to assist in a variety of emergencies. All five of Trakr’s genetic doubles are being trained to participate.
23. Hawthorne countered some of these concerns by saying that GSC would get its eggs by purchasing them from clinics spaying female cats and dogs, thus sparing healthy animals the burden of unnecessary surgery. The A&M researchers got most of their cat eggs from such clinics, but when it came to canines, the same approach ‘never worked out well’, Westhusin says. ‘We never could figure out how to actually collect ovaries from a spay clinic and get these to mature in vitro to the point that they could be used for nuclear transfer.’
24. In Europe, guidelines for the housing and care of lab animals are laid out in Directive 2010/63/EU. In addition to outlining how to safeguard animal welfare, the directive also urges scientists to find alternatives to animal experimentation when possible.
25. Universities and other scientific institutions are required to set up their own Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees to review research proposals and ensure that they meet the act’s standards. Institutions that receive US government funds for animal research are also required to comply with additional welfare protocols, including those set out by the Institute for Laboratory and Animal Research in its Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, as well as the American Veterinary Medical Association’s guidelines on euthanasia.
26. Scepticism of livestock cloning appears to run even higher in Europe; 77 percent of Europeans say animal cloning for food production is ‘fundamentally unnatural’, and 67 percent say the prospect makes them feel uneasy, according to a 2010 survey of more than 26,000 people in all the EU member nations. The survey did not ask about pet cloning.
27. One small piece of evidence for improvements in efficiency came in 2011, when news broke that Dolly had been cloned again. Four genetic copies of the infamous sheep are alive and well in Scotland. While it required twenty-nine cloned embryos to create Dolly, each of these four new clones required just five embryos.
28. Despite the furore over cloned meat, American and European agencies have both concluded that meat and milk from clones is indistinguishable from food products derived from conventionally bred animals – and that these cloned products are unlikely to pose any additional health risks. Nevertheless, the US Department of Agriculture has issued a voluntary moratorium, asking owners of cloned livestock to keep the animals out of the food supply. In the EU, cloned food products are subject to the Novel Food Regulation, adopted in 1997, which means that they must receive official approval before they can be sold to the public. So far, no one has sought such approval in Europe. Perhaps that’s because actual clones – which cost a lot to produce and are stuffed full of great genes – are simply too valuable to their owners to be slaughtered. Instead, cloned cows will most likely be used as breeding stock, and their offspring, conceived in the normal way, will end up in supermarkets.
29. One of ViaGen’s financial backers? Our good friend John Sperling.
30. A 2011 Gallup poll shows that respondents between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are more likely than their elders to view cloning as morally acceptable, a trend that may drive further acceptance.
31. RNL Bio also has plans to expand – a recent press release made cryptic reference to a planned ‘theme park for cloned dogs’. I assume this involves creating a place where we can interact with cloned canines, but I prefer to imagine a carnival where the duplicated dogs themselves can unwind, riding Ferris wheels and eating chips.
32. I would later discover that there is, indeed, a clouded leopard hidden in these woods, though it’s tucked away safely inside a cage.
33. Animals created through nuclear transfer, you may recall, aren’t quite perfect replicas of their DNA donors, because they contain the mitochondrial DNA from their egg donors. And so, using interspecies nuclear transfer to duplicate an endangered species raises an interesting philosophical question. As the Rutgers University biologist David Ehrenfeld put it in a 2006 essay, ‘[I]s a cloned animal, whose mitochondrial DNA is at least partly from the egg donor species, a true copy of the species we are trying to conserve; and does it matter if it is . . . ?’ It’s a provocative question, but in the long run, scientists could keep the foreign DNA from spreading through a wild population with a little careful breeding. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited entirely from the mother, all researchers would have to do is prevent the female offspring of female clones from having kittens. Male offspring of female clones, and all offspring of male clones, could reproduce freely.
34. One dream is to resurrect Lonesome George, the famous Galapagos tortoise who died in 2012. George was the planet’s last Pinta giant tortoise, and after his sudden death, scientists hustled to preserve some of his cells. The president of Ecuador said he hopes researchers will clone George, but before that becomes possible, scientists will need to learn much more about the reproductive biology of tortoises, as well as figure out how to clone reptiles.
35. Ehrenfeld did endorse frozen zoos, writing that DNA banking ‘entails low risk, and seems worthwhile insurance against future discoveries and needs that we cannot know at this time’.
36. Among other things, the tracking data led the Craigheads to conclude that the park would be well advised to gradually phase out its open-pit rubbish heaps which attracted hungry bears.
37. TOPP was one of seventeen projects launched in 2000 as part of the Census of Marine Life, a massive ten-year global collaboration among 2700 scientists in more than eighty different countries. The goal was to document the variety of life-forms that live in the world’s oceans, from plankton to mako sharks, in habitats ranging from coral reefs to deepwater vents.
38. The TOPP team, for instance, affixed satellite tags – each about the size of a deck of cards and equipped with a short antenna – to the dorsal fins of mako and blue sharks. Thereafter, whenever the toothy predator’s fin slices through the surface of the water, the antenna is exposed and begins transmitting information to a network of satellites. The satellites triangulate the signal, determine the shark’s approximate location, and send this information off to scientists. When the shark slips back below the surface, the apparatus switches off.
39. The transmission of an animal’s movements in real time – through the radio collars on bears or the satellite transmitters on sharks – is generally referred to as biotelemetry. The use of instruments that store data, rather than transmit it instantaneously, is known as biologging.
40. A review of the 2007 fishing season suggests that the map predicted turtle locations reasonably well. Eight of the twelve loggerhead interactions that year happened when fishermen ignored the map and set their lines in the high-risk zone.
41. Tuna aren’t the only commercially harvested species that could benefit from long-term tracking studies. As of 2010, 28 percent of marine fish populations were overexploited, and another 53 percent were being harvested at their maximum sustainable rate. Tags might help us discover better ways to manage these species, too.
42. The glue and tags stay put until the seals undergo their annual moult and then simply fall off, leaving no lasting scars.
43. You can see Winter swim with your own eyes, via the live webcam on the aquarium’s website (www.seewinter.com).
44. The breakthrough was too late for Buck, who eventually died of liver cancer. ‘Even though he never got Neuticles, he changed the world’, Miller says.
45. Since MRI machines require a subject to lie motionless inside a narrow tube for an extended period of time, it’s been tricky to get good scans of animals that are awake. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, recently showed that we can get dogs to be good MRI subjects through simple training. Using nothing more than positive reinforcement, Berns and his colleagues taught Callie, a two-year-old mutt, and McKenzie, a three-year-old border collie, to climb into the MRI tube, position their snouts on a chin rest, and then lay there, motionless, until the scan was complete.
46. Neutering may be tough on dogs, but vets and animal welfare groups overwhelmingly support the practice as a way to drastically reduce the number of unwanted pets in the world.
47. For women, however, Miller has created a special line of Neuticle jewellery; for a small fee, the discerning lady can now wear real, 100 percent genuine, fake testicles around her neck.
48. Some of the AKC’s breed guidelines simply describe characteristics of healthy animals, explaining that certain dogs should have silky and glossy coats, or a smooth gait, or a full set of well-aligned teeth. But other stipulations reflect seemingly arbitrary aesthetic preferences. Consider the Labrador retriever, America’s prototypical family dog. Labs that want a shot in the show ring better have black or brown noses. According to the AKC, ‘a thoroughly pink nose . . . is a disqualification’. A Lab’s eyes should be hazel or brown. ‘Black or yellow eyes give a harsh expression and are undesirable’, the AKC says. As for coat colour? ‘A small white spot on the chest is permissible, but not desirable’.
49. External prostheses have limitations even for human patients. As a boy, Fitzpatrick witnessed that firsthand. His uncle had a wooden leg, and one day, while they were sailing, Fitzpatrick accidentally knocked it overboard. ‘I watched it float away’, he recalls. ‘I thought, “This is crap.” ’
50. To be fair, it was tenth on their list of ten possible uses for a remotely guided rodent.
51. That’s not unusual – our attitudes towards different species are hugely inconsistent. (It’s right there in the title of Herzog’s book: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.)
52. They also respond to different wavelengths of light. Add one kind of opsin to a mouse neuron and it will fire whenever you bathe it in blue light. Using a different opsin lets you silence the neuron with yellow light.
53. The Backyard Brains website keeps a running tally of how many people have eavesdropped on neural activity for the first time, thanks to the SpikerBox. As of June 2012, the total was 15,809 people and counting.
54. For the most part, invertebrates (such as cockroaches) are not protected by federal or institutional regulations on animal research and experimentation. It’s not clear whether or how the government would respond if Gage and Marzullo decided to sell, say, robo-rat kits, but any use of vertebrates, such as rodents or birds, would likely open them up to more legal scrutiny.
55. The pair rarely lets a teaching opportunity pass them by. While on a flight together, they once posted a sign on the airplane bathroom door advertising FREE NEUROSCIENCE LESSONS at seats 33A and 33B.
56. For example, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, the breed that gave my Milo half of his DNA, have been bred to have domed heads. The result is a skull that’s too small and underdeveloped for the dogs’ brains, causing spinal cord problems, brain damage and chronic pain in many Cavaliers.