South Korean researchers are reporting today that they have cloned what scientists deem the most difficult animal, the dog.
The group worked for nearly three years, seven days a week, 365 days a year and used 1,095 eggs from 122 dogs before finally succeeding with the birth of a cloned male Afghan hound. The surrogate mother was a yellow Labrador retriever.
Dogs have such an unusual reproductive biology, far more so than humans, scientists say, that the methods that allowed cloning of sheep, mice, cows, goats, pigs, rabbits, cats, a mule, a horse and three rats, and creation of cloned human embryos for stem cells, simply do not work with them.
Cloning enthusiasts no doubt see this as a major triumph, but ethicists may see it as yet another, well, Sign of the Apocalypse. I'm somewhat ambivalent.
On the one hand, I find cloning troubling enough as it is, and, now that it's moved on into the canine world, I'm even more seriously disturbed by it. I'm hardly a moralist, let alone a religious one, but do I worry when humans play God and mess with nature. I know that's a fairly simplistic way to look at it, but I'm just not sure that the cloning of human beings would be such a good thing. (Use your imagination and think of what could be done and what could go wrong.)
On the other hand, I recognize that a lot of good could come from cloning, or at least from cloning research. I support stem-cell research, for example, and these same South Korean researchers have already extracted stem-cells from cloned human embryos.
No, I wouldn't say that this latest development is a SOTA -- surely it's not as troubling as, say, Brangelina (see right sidebar) -- but it's quite possible that ill-conceived and ill-advised cloning will lead us ever further in that direction. Scientific advancement is very much a part of the human condition, but it needs to be balanced by a healthy sense of responsibility and perspective. I wonder if the cloning enthusiasts really know what they're doing.
