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Jessica Pierce
March 6,2018

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Op-Ed Contributor

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Cloned Yakutian Laika puppies cloned and raised by NEFU (Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University) in Yakutsk, Russia last year. Credit Credit Vadim Skryabin\TASS, via Getty Images

Why, people want to know, did Barbra Streisand decide to clone Samantha, her coton de tulear? What would compel someone to spend $50,000 or more to create a genetic replica of a pet dog?

In the recent buzz over pet cloning, the issue has largely been framed as a personal decision, albeit a quirky one. But the decision to clone is not merely personal. There are broader ramifications for dogs, not only for the large group of dogs we call pets but also for a whole canine underclass that remains largely invisible to us but whose bodies serve as a biological substrate for cloning research and industry.

Clones like Ms. Streisand's dogs Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett don't materialize out of thin air but require the help of a whole team of female dogs. The cloning process begins with a group of dogs that will "donate" their eggs, a process that involves pharmaceutical manipulation of hormone levels and a surgical egg-harvesting procedure. Once removed from the donor dogs' ovaries, the eggs will be enucleated - the unwanted DNA from the egg donor is wiped clean and the desired DNA from the pet is inserted.

If all goes well and the eggs fertilize, they will be surgically implanted into one or more canine surrogate mothers that will carry a litter of cloned puppies to term. After performing their tasks of producing a dog, the worker dogs will be used for another purpose.

Dogs, it seems, can inhabit very different moral habitats within the human mind and within our cultural frameworks. Extreme value, both monetary and emotional, is placed on certain individual dogs, while an entire underclass of dogs are treated as objects, as means to an end, as cogs in the wheels of human commerce and moneymaking.

The exploitation of the canine underclass is perhaps the most insidious problem with cloning. But there are other things to worry about. Two of the nation's most prominent animal advocacy organizations, the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have come out against cloning pets. They have profound concerns about the welfare of the animals involved in cloning research, but they also point out that millions of dogs are languishing in shelters, waiting for a home and often facing early death by euthanasia. We collectively, as a pet-obsessed culture, are responsible for their situation. And yet we can feel O.K. about spending tens of thousands of dollars and tremendous energy and resources to produce cloned puppies? (Ms. Streisand also adopted a rescue dog after Samantha's death.)

The moral admonition to "adopt, don't shop" is not only about saving the life of a homeless dog but also about moving past shaky and unsubstantiated assertions that certain dogs, usually the so-called purebreds, are somehow smarter, more athletic, more beautiful and better behaved than mongrels, and that by spending loads of money on a dog, we're going to get exactly what we want and expect. None of this is true.

Cloning is symptomatic of deeper problems in how our culture thinks about pet dogs. It reinforces the status of dogs as things to buy and collect, and as sentimental tokens and emotional support objects. Dogs are valued for our feelings toward them, rather than for who they are as individuals.

In 2016, a cloning company sought to partner with an animal hospice and palliative care organization on whose board I serve. We declined. Veterinary practices providing end-of-life care are an an obvious market for pet cloning services, since these veterinarians serve clients who are staring into the abyss of loss. Veterinarians might, these companies suggest, offer DNA banking or cloning to help soften a pet owner's grief, to create an emotional bridge that might help a dog owner "let go" so that a dog isn't made to suffer at the end of life by a distraught human trying to prolong the relationship.

Denial and complicated grieving are surely part of the landscape of veterinary end-of-life care. But there are much healthier ways to support pet owners dealing with death - for example, by enlisting the help of a social worker trained in pet loss and bereavement.

Because I have written elsewhere about the ethics of cloning pets, I've received emails from people trying to convince me that I'm wrong to condemn cloning. They've shared their stories of being saved from an emotional shipwreck by the re-creation of a beloved dog into a cloned sister or brother. They've described to me the intense bond they have with the cloned dog and how that bond is even stronger, if that is possible, than the bond with the original.

When it comes to the power of the human-canine bond, I sympathize. My dog Maya is nearly 15 and has stepped onto the down escalator of physical deterioration. I know what's at the bottom, and I can hardly bear the thought of losing her. And yet, even if I had millions of dollars at my disposal, I wouldn't consider cloning Maya. It isn't because she's not exceptional, but precisely because she is.

Biotech companies that provide cloning services to pet owners are selling an illusion. They are selling a dream of never having to say goodbye. But this is an unhealthy dream, both for the dreamer and for those animals whose work it is to produce these clones. The prospect of losing a pet can be unthinkable, but it is inevitable. Why spread the suffering to the underclass of dogs that are forced to do the reproductive work, and to all of us, by making our relationship to dogs all about ourselves?

We claim to be a pet-loving culture. But supporting the cloning industry, either by purchasing a cloned pet or by wishing that you could, is a tainted kind of love.

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Opinion | You Love Dogs? Then Don't Clone Them

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Op-Ed Contributor Why, people want to know, did Barbra Streisand decide to clone Samantha, her coton de tulear? What would compel someone to spend $50,000 or more to create a genetic replica of a pet dog? In the recent buzz over pet cloning, the issue has largely been framed as a personal decision, albeit a quirky one.

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Forgot The 3D Printer: 4D Printing Could Change Everything

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Forgot The 3D Printer: 4D Printing Could Change Everything

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Randy Rieland
May 16, 2014

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These days, 3D printing seems to be at the core of most new new research ventures, whether it's developing ways to print entire meals or recreating facial features to repair a patient's face.

But Skylar Tibbits wants to up the ante: He's hoping 4D printing will be the thing of the not-so-far future.

The name for his concept, Tibbits admits, was a bit lighthearted at first. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tibbits and researchers from the firms Stratasys and Autodesk Inc were trying to come up with a way of describing the objects they were creating on 3D printers-objects that not only could be printed, but thanks to geometric code, could also later change shape and transform on their own.

The name stuck, and now the process they developed-which turns code into "smart objects" that can self-assemble or change shape when confronted with a change in its environment-could very well pop up in a number of industries, from construction to athletic wear.

"Normally, we print things and we think they're done," Tibbits says. "That the final output and then we assemble them. But we want them to be able to transform and change shape over time. And we want them to assemble themselves."

Tibbits, a research scientist at MIT, was given the go-ahead last year to establish what's known as the university's Self-Assembly Lab. The challenge was to see how smart researchers could make an object without relying on sensors or chips; how fluid they could make something without wires or motors.

As luck would have it, when Tibbits shared this dilemma with acquaintances at Stratasys, a leading 3D printing firm, they told him the company had developed a printing material that expands by 150 percent when placed in water. It sounded promising. But the real question was how to bring precision to that transformation so an object could unfold, curl and form specific angles instead of just swelling up like a bloated sponge.

Tibbits' answer: Geometry.

With a 3D printer, an operator plugs in a virtual blueprint for an object, which the printer uses to construct the final product layer by layer. To make something "4D," though, Tibbits feeds the printer a precise geometric code based on the object's own angles and dimensions but also measurements that dictate how it should change shape when confronted with outside forces such as water, movement or a change in temperature.

In short, the code sets the direction, the number of times and the angles at which a material can bend and curl. When that object is confronted with a change in environment, it can be stimulated to change shape. Pipes, for instance, could programmed to expand or shrink to help move water; bricks could shift to accommodate more or less stress on a given wall.

Tibbits demonstrated the concept of 4D printing at a TED talk last year, during which he showed how a single strand of printed material could be programmed to fold, on its own, into the word "MIT."
(See a video of that demo below) The shapes of things to come
At face value, it's a concept that's very cool. But when can we expect to see these kinds of transformations out in the real world?

In some cases, they're already happening. Tibbits points out that in nanotechnology, scientists have been able to program physical and biological materials to change their shapes and properties-such as using DNA to self-assemble nanorobots.

Making this happen on a human scale, he concedes, is much more challenging, particularly in more traditional industries, such as construction. But Tibbits says at least one company is interested is seeing how 4D programming can be applied to infrastructure. There's potential, he says, in using self-assembling materials in disaster areas or extreme environments where conventional construction is not feasible or too expensive. For instance, he sees a future for what he calls "adaptive infrastructure" in space.

Tibbits say his lab is working closely with a number of industry partners on ways they could incorporate the 4D concept into their businesses. As for where we might see transforming products on the shelves, Tibbits envisions innovation in furniture or sportswear. He offers the example of sneakers that could change shape and function in response to how they're being used.

"If I start running," he said, "[the sneakers] should adapt to being running shoes. If I play basketball, they adapt to support my ankles more. If I go on grass, they should grow cleats or become waterproof if it's raining. It's not like the shoe would understand that you're playing basketball, of course, but it can tell what kind of energy or what type of forces are being applied by your foot. It could transform based on pressure. Or it could be moisture or temperature change. "
Multi-dimensional thinking
Here's some other recent developments in 3D and 4D printing:

Army maneuvers: The U.S. Army has given a grant to Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh and University of Illinois to explore ways the military could use self-assembling objects, raising the possibility of shelters or bridges that spring into shape.

Just don't tell anyone your makeup came right off the printer: Harvard student Grace Choi has created a prototype for a 3D printer called "Mink" that is designed to let users choose any color imaginable and then actually print out makeup in that hue.

All in a day's work: In China, an engineering company used 3D printers to build 10 one-story houses in a day. The printers, which were 33 feet wide and 22 feet high, used a mix of cement and construction waste to build the walls layer by layer.

And for more on the potential of 4D printing, check out this video:
This article has been updated to reflect Stratys and Autodesk Inc's involvement in 4D printing research.

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Forget the 3D Printer: 4D Printing Could Change Everything

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These days, 3D printing seems to be at the core of most new new research ventures, whether it's developing ways to print entire meals or recreating facial features to repair a patient's face. But Skylar Tibbits wants to up the ante: He's hoping 4D printing will be the thing of the not-so-far future.

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Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics by Paul Pangaro from Spring of 1990

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Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics by Paul Pangaro from Spring of 1990

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http://www.pangaro.com/syllabi/AI-vs-Cyb-syllabus.html
Purposefully picked older date to show its origin and how it has evolved.

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World’s first ever 4D printing for ceramics 

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World’s first ever 4D printing for ceramics 

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Guo Liu, Yan Zhao, Ge Wu, Jian Lu.
August 18, 2018

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A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has achieved a ground-breaking advancement in materials research by successfully developing the world's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics, which are mechanically robust and can have complex shapes. This could turn a new page in the structural application of ceramics.

Ceramic has a high melting point, so it is difficult to use conventional laser printing to make ceramics. The existing 3D-printed ceramic precursors, which are usually difficult to deform, also hinder the production of ceramics with complex shapes.

To overcome these challenges, the CityU team has developed a novel "ceramic ink," which is a mixture of polymers and ceramic nanoparticles. The 3D-printed ceramic precursors printed with this novel ink are soft and can be stretched three times beyond their initial length. These flexible and stretchable ceramic precursors allow complex shapes, such as origami folding. With proper heat treatment, ceramics with complex shapes can be made.

The team was led by Professor Jian Lu, Vice-President (Research and Technology) and Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who is a distinguished materials scientist with research interests ranging from fabricating nanomaterials and advanced structural materials to the computational simulation of surface engineering.

With the development of the elastic precursors, the research team has achieved one more breakthrough by developing two methods of 4D printing of ceramics.

4D printing is conventional 3D printing combined with the additional element of time as the fourth dimension, where the printed objects can re-shape or self-assemble themselves over time with external stimuli, such as mechanical force, temperature, or a magnetic field.

In this research, the team made use of the elastic energy stored in the stretched precursors for shape morphing. When the stretched ceramic precursors are released, they undergo self-reshaping. After heat treatment, the precursors turn into ceramics.

The resultant elastomer-derived ceramics are mechanically robust. They can have a high compressive strength-to-density ratio (547 MPa on 1.6 g cm-3 microlattice), and they can come in large sizes with high strength compared to other printed ceramics.

"The whole process sounds simple, but it's not," said Professor Lu. "From making the ink to developing the printing system, we tried many times and different methods. Like squeezing icing on a cake, there are a lot of factors that can affect the outcome, ranging from the type of cream and the size of the nozzle, to the speed and force of squeezing, and the temperature."

It took more than two and a half years for the team to overcome the limitations of the existing materials and to develop the whole 4D ceramic printing system.

In the first shaping method, a 3D-printed ceramic precursor and substrate were first printed with the novel ink. The substrate was stretched using a biaxial stretching device, and joints for connecting the precursor were printed on it. The precursor was then placed on the stretched substrate. With the computer-programmed control of time and the release of the stretched substrate, the materials morphed into the designed shape.

In the second method, the designed pattern was directly printed on the stretched ceramic precursor. It was then released under computer-programming control and underwent the self-morphing process.

The innovation was published in the latest issue of top academic journal Science Advances under the title "Origami and 4D printing of elastomer-derived ceramic structures." All research team members are from CityU, including Dr LIU Guo, Research Assistant, Dr ZHAO Yan, Senior Research Associate, and Dr WU Ge, Research Fellow.

"With the versatile shape-morphing capability of the printed ceramic precursors, its application can be huge!" said Professor Lu. One promising application will be for electronic devices. Ceramic materials have much better performance in transmitting electromagnetic signals than metallic materials. With the arrival of 5G networks, ceramic products will play a more important role in the manufacture of electronic products. The artistic nature of ceramics and their capability to form complex shapes also provide the potential for consumers to tailor-make uniquely designed ceramic mobile phone back plates.

Furthermore, this innovation can be applied in the aero industry and space exploration. "Since ceramic is a mechanically robust material that can tolerate high temperatures, the 4D-printed ceramic has high potential to be used as a propulsion component in the aerospace field," said Prof Lu.

Riding on the breakthrough in material and 4D-printing technique advancement, Prof Lu said the next step is to enhance the mechanical properties of the material, such as reducing its brittleness.

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electronics; materials science; engineering and construction; 3-d printing; civil engineering; technology; thermodynamics; engineering

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World's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has achieved a ground-breaking advancement in materials research by successfully developing the world's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics, which are mechanically robust and can have complex shapes. This could turn a new page in the structural application of ceramics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has achieved a ground-breaking advancement in materials research by successfully developing the world's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics, which are mechanically robust and can have complex shapes. This could turn a new page in the structural application of ceramics.

Ceramic has a high melting point, so it is difficult to use conventional laser printing to make ceramics. The existing 3D-printed ceramic precursors, which are usually difficult to deform, also hinder the production of ceramics with complex shapes.

To overcome these challenges, the CityU team has developed a novel "ceramic ink," which is a mixture of polymers and ceramic nanoparticles. The 3D-printed ceramic precursors printed with this novel ink are soft and can be stretched three times beyond their initial length. These flexible and stretchable ceramic precursors allow complex shapes, such as origami folding. With proper heat treatment, ceramics with complex shapes can be made.

The team was led by Professor Jian Lu, Vice-President (Research and Technology) and Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who is a distinguished materials scientist with research interests ranging from fabricating nanomaterials and advanced structural materials to the computational simulation of surface engineering.

With the development of the elastic precursors, the research team has achieved one more breakthrough by developing two methods of 4D printing of ceramics.

4D printing is conventional 3D printing combined with the additional element of time as the fourth dimension, where the printed objects can re-shape or self-assemble themselves over time with external stimuli, such as mechanical force, temperature, or a magnetic field.

In this research, the team made use of the elastic energy stored in the stretched precursors for shape morphing. When the stretched ceramic precursors are released, they undergo self-reshaping. After heat treatment, the precursors turn into ceramics.

The resultant elastomer-derived ceramics are mechanically robust. They can have a high compressive strength-to-density ratio (547 MPa on 1.6 g cm-3 microlattice), and they can come in large sizes with high strength compared to other printed ceramics.

"The whole process sounds simple, but it's not," said Professor Lu. "From making the ink to developing the printing system, we tried many times and different methods. Like squeezing icing on a cake, there are a lot of factors that can affect the outcome, ranging from the type of cream and the size of the nozzle, to the speed and force of squeezing, and the temperature."

It took more than two and a half years for the team to overcome the limitations of the existing materials and to develop the whole 4D ceramic printing system.

In the first shaping method, a 3D-printed ceramic precursor and substrate were first printed with the novel ink. The substrate was stretched using a biaxial stretching device, and joints for connecting the precursor were printed on it. The precursor was then placed on the stretched substrate. With the computer-programmed control of time and the release of the stretched substrate, the materials morphed into the designed shape.

In the second method, the designed pattern was directly printed on the stretched ceramic precursor. It was then released under computer-programming control and underwent the self-morphing process.

The innovation was published in the latest issue of top academic journal Science Advances under the title "Origami and 4D printing of elastomer-derived ceramic structures." All research team members are from CityU, including Dr LIU Guo, Research Assistant, Dr ZHAO Yan, Senior Research Associate, and Dr WU Ge, Research Fellow.

"With the versatile shape-morphing capability of the printed ceramic precursors, its application can be huge!" said Professor Lu. One promising application will be for electronic devices. Ceramic materials have much better performance in transmitting electromagnetic signals than metallic materials. With the arrival of 5G networks, ceramic products will play a more important role in the manufacture of electronic products. The artistic nature of ceramics and their capability to form complex shapes also provide the potential for consumers to tailor-make uniquely designed ceramic mobile phone back plates.

Furthermore, this innovation can be applied in the aero industry and space exploration. "Since ceramic is a mechanically robust material that can tolerate high temperatures, the 4D-printed ceramic has high potential to be used as a propulsion component in the aerospace field," said Prof Lu.

Riding on the breakthrough in material and 4D-printing technique advancement, Prof Lu said the next step is to enhance the mechanical properties of the material, such as reducing its brittleness.

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electronics; materials science; engineering and construction; 3-d printing; civil engineering; technology; thermodynamics; engineering

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
World's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has achieved a ground-breaking advancement in materials research by successfully developing the world's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics, which are mechanically robust and can have complex shapes. This could turn a new page in the structural application of ceramics.

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Title: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics
By: Kevin Warwick
2015

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Genetic Science Learning Center July 10, 2014

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Our experiences have told us that, with a little work, we humans can clone just about anything we want, from frogs to sheep-and probably even ourselves.

So we can clone things. But why would we want to? Below are some of the ways in which cloning might be useful.

Cloning for medical purposes has the potential to benefit large numbers of people. How might cloning be used in medicine?

Cloning animal models of disease

Much of what researchers learn about human disease comes from studying animal models such as mice. Often, animal models are genetically engineered to carry disease-causing mutations in their genes. Creating these transgenic animals is a time-intensive process that requires trial-and-error and several generations of breeding. Cloning could help reduce the time needed to make a transgenic animal model, and the result would be a population of genetically identical animals for study.

Cloning to make stem cells

Stem cells build, maintain, and repair the body throughout our lives. Because these are processes that stem cells do naturally, they can be manipulated to repair damaged or diseased organs and tissues. But stem cells transferred from one person to another (such as in a bone marrow transplant) are seen as foreign, and they usually trigger an immune response.

Some researchers are looking at cloning as a way to create stem cells that are genetically identical to an individual. These cells could then be used for medical purposes, possibly even for growing whole organs. And stem cells cloned from someone with a disease could be grown in culture and studied to help researchers understand the disease and develop treatments.

In 2013, scientists at Oregon Health and Science University were the first to use cloning techniques to successfully create human embryonic stem cells. The donor DNA came from an 8-month-old with a rare genetic disease.

Find out more about Stem Cells.

You might have seen the Jurassic Park movies. In the original feature film, based on the Michael Crichton novel, scientists use DNA preserved for tens of millions of years to clone dinosaurs. They run into trouble, however, when they realize that the cloned creatures were smarter and fiercer than expected. Could we really clone dinosaurs?

In theory? Yes. You would need:

A well-preserved source of DNA from the extinct dinosaur, and

A closely related species, currently living, that could serve as an egg donor and surrogate mother.

In reality? Probably not.

It's extremely unlikely that dinosaur DNA could survive undamaged for such a long time. However, scientists have been working to clone species that became extinct more recently, using DNA from well-preserved tissue samples. A number of projects are underway to clone extinct species, including the wooly mammoth.

In 2009, scientists had their first near-success resurrecting an extinct animal. Using goats as egg donors and surrogates, they made several clones of a wild mountain goat called the bucardo-but the longest-surviving clone died soon after birth. Even if the effort eventually succeeds, the only frozen tissue sample comes from a female, so it will only produce female clones. However, scientists speculate they may beable to remove one X chromosome and add a Y chromosome from a related goat species to make a male.

Cloning endangered species is much easier, mainly because the surviving animals can donate healthy, living cells. In fact, several wild species have been cloned already, including two relatives of cattle called the guar and the banteng, mouflon sheep, deer, bison, and coyotes. However, some experts are skeptical that cloning can help a species recover. One big challenge endangered species face is the loss of genetic diversity, and cloning does nothing to address this problem. When a species has high genetic diversity, there is a better chance that some individuals would have genetic variations that could help them survive an environmental challenge such as an infectious disease. Cloning also does not address the problems that put the species in danger in the first place, such as habitat destruction and hunting. But cloning may be one more tool that conservation scientists can add to their toolbox.

Learn more about Conservation Genetics.

Left: the alpine ibex, a close cousin of the Bucardo. Right: the last remaining Bucardo with the research team before her eventual death. She was blindfolded to shield her eyes from the photographer's flash. Image courtesy of Advanced Cell Technology.

Reproducing a Deceased Pet

If you really wanted to, and if you had enough money, you could clone your beloved family cat. At least one biotechnology company in the United States has offered cat cloning services for the privileged and bereaved. But don't assume that your cloned kitty will be exactly the same as the one you know and love. An individual is a product of more than its genes-the environment plays an important role in shaping personality and many other traits.

On December 22, 2001, a kitten named CC made history as the first cat-and the first domestic pet-ever to be cloned. CC and Rainbow, the donor of CC's genetic material, are pictured at the right.

But do you notice something odd about this picture? If CC is a clone of Rainbow-an exact genetic copy-then why are they different colors?

The answer lies in the X chromosome. In cats, a gene that helps determine coat color resides on this chromosome. Both CC and Rainbow, being females, have two X chromosomes. (Males have one X and one Y chromosome.) Since the two cats have the exact same X chromosomes, they have the same two coat color genes, one specifying black and the other specifying orange.

Very early in her development, each of Rainbow's cells "turned off" oneentire X chromosome, thereby turning off either the black or the orange color gene. This process, called X-inactivation, happens normally in females, in order to prevent them from having twice as much X-chromosome activity as males. It also happens randomly, meaning that different cells turn off different X chromosomes.

So like all female mammals, Rainbow developed as a mosaic. Each cell that underwent X-inactivation gave rise to a patch of cells that had oneor the other coat color gene inactivated. Some patches specified black,other patches specified orange, and still others specified white, due to more complex genetic events. This is how all calico cats, like Rainbow, get their markings.

CC looks different because she was made from a somatic cell from Rainbow in which the X-chromosome with the orange gene had been inactivated; only the black gene was active. What's interesting is that, as CC developed, her cells did not change the inactivation pattern. Therefore, unlike Rainbow, CC developed without any cells that specified orange coat color. The result is CC's black and white tiger-tabby coat.

Left: CC (or Carbon Copy). Right: Rainbow. Photo courtesy TAMU, College of Veterinary Medicine.

Rainbow and CC are living proof that a clone will not look exactly like the donor of its genetic material.

Programs are underway to clone agricultural animals, such as cattle and pigs, that are efficient producers of high-quality milk or meat.

A group of researchers at Utah State University led by Dr. Ken White, Dean of College of Agriculture & Applied Science, have been able to clone steer from slaughterhouse carcasses. Their aim isn't to produce animals for consumption-cloning is far more labor-intensive and expensive than conventional breeding methods. Instead, they want to use these animals as breeding stock.

The important thing to know about beef cattle is that the quality and yield of their meat can be assessed only after they are slaughtered. And male animals are routinely neutered when they're a few days old. That is, their testes are removed, so they are unable to make sperm. But cells from a high-quality carcass can be cloned, giving rise to an animal that is able, though conventional breeding methods, to pass its superior genes to its offspring.

Scientists have also cloned mules, a reproductively sterile hybrid of a male donkey and a female horse; dairy cows; and horses. One gelded racing horse, a male whose testes have been removed, has a clone that is available for breeding. Some of the cloned cows produce about twice as much milk as the average producer. And a cloned racing mule is ranked among the best in the world.

Farm animals such as cows, sheep, and goats are being genetically engineered to produce drugs or proteins that are useful in medicine. As an example, scientists could take cells from a cow that produces large amounts of milk and grow them in culture. Then they could insert a gene into the DNA of these cells that codes for a drug or a vaccine. If they take the nucleus from one of these cells and transfer it to a cow egg, it could develop into a cow that makes the drug in its milk. Since every cell in the cow would carry the drug gene, it could pass the gene to its offspring, creating a whole herd of drug-producing cows. Even better, we could avoid the issue of the genetic reshuffling that happensduring sexual reproduction and simply clone our drug-producing cow.

The prospect of cloning humans is highly controversial, and it raises a number of ethical, legal, and social challenges that need to be considered.

The vast majority of scientists and lawmakers view human reproductive cloning-cloning for the purpose of making a human baby-immoral. Supporters see it as a possible solution to infertility problems. Some even imagine making clones of geniuses, whose work could advance society. Far-fetched views describe farms filled with clones whose organs are harvested for transplantation-a truly horrific idea.

For now, risks and technical challenges-as well as laws that make it illegal-will probably keep human reproductive cloning from becoming a reality. Even though many species have been cloned successfully, the process is still technically difficult and inefficient. The success rate in cloning is quite low: most embryos fail to develop, and many pregnancies end in miscarriage.

Current efforts at human cloning are focused on creating embryonic stem cells for research and medicine, as described above. However, many feel that this type of therapeutic cloning comes dangerously close to human reproductive cloning. And once techniques become more streamlined and efficient, they fear that some may be tempted to take that next step.

From a technical and moral standpoint, before human cloning becomes routine, we need to have a good idea of the risks involved.

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Our experiences have told us that, with a little work, we humans can clone just about anything we want, from frogs to sheep-and probably even ourselves. So we can clone things. But why would we want to? Below are some of the ways in which cloning might be useful.

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4D printing: processability and measurement of recovery force in shape memory polymers.

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4D printing: processability and measurement of recovery force in shape memory polymers.

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International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology
2003-present

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Animal Cloning> A Primer on Cloning and Its Use in Livestock Operations

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Animal Cloning> A Primer on Cloning and Its Use in Livestock Operations

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-FDA
-8/29/2018

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The responses to the questions provided in this document represent the FDA's view in light of the conclusions and recommendations outlined in the Animal Cloning Risk Assessment, Risk Management Plan, and Guidance for Industry #179. What is cloning, really?
What can go wrong with cloning?
Why is there interest in cloning?
Is it safe to eat food from clones?
What's next?
What is the National Academy of Sciences?
Imagine the perfect dairy cow. For eight years she has gotten pregnant on the first try, given birth easily, and produced gallon upon gallon of the best milk. Even when others in the herd got sick, she stayed healthy. She is ideally suited to the climate in which she lives. The farmer has depended on this cow and her daughters in lean times to carry the farm through, but now she is at the end of her reproductive life.

Although the farmer may have this cow's daughters to carry on the line, he also has another alternative: copying her. Biological copying is referred to as cloning. By cloning his prize cow, breeding the clones, and keeping their offspring, the farmer can introduce the natural positive characteristics into the herd quickly. It would take several more years to achieve these same improvements by conventional breeding.
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Farmers can also clone animals to produce more uniform quality meat. Take, for example, a male swine (boar) that time after time sires offspring that mature quickly and provide lean meat. If a farmer has several of these boars he could quickly produce an entire herd with consistent, high quality meat.

Researchers have been cloning livestock since 1996. When it became apparent that cloning could become a commercial venture in 2001, the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine asked that food from clones and their offspring be voluntarily kept out of the food chain. FDA then began an intensive evaluation that included examining the safety of food from these animals.

What is cloning, really?

Cloning is a complex process that lets one exactly copy the genetic, or inherited, traits of an animal (the donor). Livestock species that scientists have successfully cloned are cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. Scientists have also cloned mice, rats, rabbits, cats, mules, horses and one dog. Chickens and other poultry have not been cloned.
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Most people think of livestock breeding taking place through traditional mating, in which males and females physically get together to reproduce. In fact, this is not often the case. Traditional mating is not that efficient, if the goal is to produce as many offspring as possible. For example, a male has enough sperm to produce many more offspring than would be possible by traditional mating. Traditional mating also has certain risks: one or both of the animals may be injured in the process of mating. The female may be hurt by the male because he is often much larger, or an unwilling female may injure the male. There is also a risk of infection or transmission of venereal disease during traditional mating.

Because of these factors, many farmers use assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) for breeding. These include artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and in vitro fertilization (a process by which egg and sperm are united outside the body). Artificial insemination was first documented in the breeding of horses in the 14th century. The first successful embryo transfer of a cow was in 1951, and the first in vitro fertilization (IVF)-derived animal was a rabbit born in 1959. Livestock production in the United States now uses all these methods regularly. For example, most dairy farms don't have bulls, so more than 70 percent of the Holstein cows bred in the United States are artificially inseminated. The frozen semen can come from a bull many miles, or even many states, away.

Cloning is a more advanced form of these assisted reproductive technologies. Much of the public perception of cloning likely comes from science fiction books and movies. Some people incorrectly believe that clones spring forth fully formed, or are grown in test tubes. This is just not the case.

Clones are born just like other animals. They are similar to identical twins, only born at different times. Just as twins share the same DNA, clones have the same genes as the donor animal. A clone is not a mutant, nor is it a weaker version of the original animal.

In all of the other assisted reproductive technologies, the male and female parents each contribute half of their genes to their offspring. Farmers have worked for years to choose animals with the best traits and breed them together. This increases the chance these good traits will be passed on and become more common in livestock herds. Even though farmers have been able to improve their herds over time, they still can't absolutely predict the characteristics of the offspring, not even their gender. Cloning gives the farmer complete control over the offspring's inherited traits. Thus, a farmer who clones an especially desirable but aging or injured animal knows in advance that the clone will have the genetic potential to be an especially good, younger animal. He can then use that animal to further reproduce by traditional mating or other ARTs

Most cloning today uses a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Just as with in vitro fertilization, scientists take an immature egg, or oocytes, from a female animal (often from ovaries obtained at the slaughterhouse). But instead of combining it with sperm, they remove the nucleus (which contains the oocytes's genes). This leaves behind the other components necessary for the initial stages of embryo development. Scientists then add the nucleus or cell from the donor animal that has the desirable traits the farmer wishes to copy. After a few other steps, the donor nucleus fuses with the ooplast (the oocytes whose nucleus has been removed), and if all goes well, starts dividing, and an embryo begins to form. The embryo is then implanted in the uterus of a surrogate dam (again the same as with in vitro fertilization), which carries it to term. ("Dam" is a term that livestock breeders use to refer to the female parent of an animal). The clone is delivered just like any other baby animal.

What can go wrong with cloning?

There are no complications that are unique to cloning. The problems seen in clones are also seen in animals born from natural mating or ARTs. They seem to happen more often in clones for a number of reasons that probably have to do with parts of the procedure that occur outside the body. The embryo may fail to develop properly during the in vitro stage or early on after transfer to the surrogate and may be flushed out of the uterus. If it does develop, the embryo may not implant properly into the uterus of the surrogate dam. Alternatively, the placenta may not form properly, and the developing animal won't get the nourishment it needs.

Large Offspring Syndrome (LOS) is seen in pregnancies of cattle and sheep that come from other ARTs and cloning. With LOS, the fetus grows too large in the uterus, making problems for the animal and its surrogate dam. LOS has not been observed in goats and swine.
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Most clones that are normal at birth become as strong and healthy as any other young animals. Calf and lamb clones tend to have more health problems at birth, and may be more likely to die right after birth than conventionally bred animals. Clones born with abnormalities may continue to have health problems for the first few months of life, but by the time clones are young adults, it's not possible to tell them apart from other animals of the same age, even if you conduct a detailed examination. Scientists at FDA and research institutions have looked at extensive health records, the development of clones, and blood work for clones that's similar to what people get when they have physicals. These results show that the clones are perfectly healthy, and walk, wean, grow, mature, and behave just like conventionally bred animals.

Why is there interest in cloning?

The main use of agricultural clones is to produce breeding stock, not food. Clones allow farmers to upgrade the overall quality of their herds by providing more copies of the best animals in the herd. These animals are then used for conventional breeding, and the sexually reproduced offspring become the food producing animals. These animals are not clones-they're just like other sexually reproduced animals. Just as farmers wouldn't use their best conventionally bred breeding animals as sources of food, they are equally unlikely to do so for clones.

Some examples of desirable characteristics in livestock that breeders might want in their herds include the following:

Disease resistance: Sick animals are expensive for farmers. Veterinary bills add up, and unhealthy animals don't produce as much meat or milk. A herd that is resistant to disease is extremely valuable because it doesn't lose any production time to illness, and doesn't cost the farmer extra money for veterinary treatment.

Suitability to Climate: Different types of livestock grow well in different climates. Some of this is natural and some results from selective breeding. For instance, Brahma cattle can cope with the heat and humidity of weather in the southwestern United States, but they often do not produce very high grades of meat. Cloning could allow breeders to select those cattle that can produce high quality meat or milk and thrive in extreme climates and use them to breed more cattle to be used for food production. Similarly, pork production has traditionally been centered in the eastern United States, but is moving to different regions of the United States (e.g., Utah). Cloning could allow breeders to select those swine that naturally do well in the new climate, and use those swine clones to breed more swine to be used for food production.

Quality body type: Farmers naturally want an animal whose body is well suited to its production function. For example, a dairy cow should have a large, well-attached udder so that she can produce lots of milk. She should also be able to carry and deliver calves easily. For animals that produce meat, farmers breed for strong, heavily-muscled, quick-maturing animals that will yield high quality meat in the shortest time possible. The most desirable bulls produce offspring that are relatively small at birth (so that they are easier for the female to carry and deliver) but that grow rapidly and are healthy after birth.

Fertility: Quality dairy cows should be very fertile, as a cow that doesn't get pregnant and bear calves won't produce milk. Male fertility is just as important as that of the female. The more sperm he can produce, the more females a bull can inseminate, and the more animals can be born. Beef cattle or other meat-producing animals such as swine need to have high fertility rates in order to replace animals that are sent to slaughter. Cloning allows farmers and breeders to clone those animals with high fertility rates so that they could bear offspring that would also tend to be very fertile.
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Market preference: Farmers or ranchers may also want to breed livestock to meet the changing tastes of consumers. These include traits like leanness, tenderness, color, size of various cuts, etc. Preferences also vary by culture, and cloning may help tailor products to the preferences of various international markets and ethnic groups.

How does cloning help get these characteristics into the herd more quickly? As we've previously said, cloning allows the breeder to increase the number of breeding animals available to make the actual food production animals. So, if a producer wanted to introduce disease resistance into a herd rapidly, cloning could be used to produce a number of breeding animals that carry the gene for disease resistance, rather than just one. Likewise, if a breeder wants to pass on the genes of a female animal, cloning could result in multiples of that female to breed, rather than just one.
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Is it Safe to Eat Food from Clones?

Yes. Food from cattle, swine, and goat clones is as safe to eat as food from any other cattle, swine, or goat. But it's important to remember that the primary purpose of clones is for breeding, not eating. Dairy, beef, or pork clones make up only a tiny fraction of the total number of food producing animals in the United States. Instead, their offspring would be the animals actually producing meat or milk for the food supply.
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Dairy clones will produce milk after they give birth, and the dairy farmers will want to be able to drink that milk or put it in the food supply. Once clones used for breeding meat-producing animals can no longer reproduce, their breeders may also want to be able to put them into the food supply.

In order to determine whether there would be any risk involved in eating meat or milk from clones or their offspring, in 1999 the FDA asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to identify science-based concerns associated with animal biotechnology, including cloning. The NAS gathered an independent group of top, peer-selected scientists from across the country to conduct this study. The scientists delivered their report in the fall of 2002. That report stated that theoretically there were no concerns for the safety of meat or milk from clones. On the other hand, the report expressed a low level of concern due to a lack of information on the clones at that time, and not for any specific scientific reasons. The report also stated that the meat and milk from the offspring of clones posed no unique food safety concerns.

Meanwhile, FDA itself began the most comprehensive examination of the health of livestock clones that has been conducted. The evaluation has taken over five years. This examination formed the basis of a Draft Risk Assessment to determine whether cloning posed a risk to animal health or to humans eating food from clones or their offspring. FDA conducted a thorough search of the scientific literature on clones, and identified hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, which it then reviewed. The agency was also able to obtain health records and blood samples from almost all of the cattle clones that have been produced in the United States and data from clones produced in other countries. FDA compared these health records, and the independently analyzed blood results with similar samples from conventional animals of the same age and breed that were raised on the same farms. FDA received thousands of comments from the public in response to the Draft Risk Assessment. For the final version of the Risk Assessment, FDA conducted an up-to-date review of the literature, added additional information from hundreds of additional references, and made many changes to address some of the public comments.

After reviewing all this information, FDA found that it could not distinguish a healthy clone from a healthy conventionally bred animal. All of the blood values, overall health records, and behaviors were in the same range for clones and conventional animals of the same breed raised on the same farms. FDA also observed that milk from dairy clones does not differ significantly in composition from milk from conventionally bred animals.

In the Risk Assessment, FDA concluded that meat and milk from cattle, swine, and goat clones is as safe as food we eat from those species now. Although we don't have any particular concerns about sheep clones, we did not have enough information to make a decision on the safety of food from sheep clones.

For another study similar to the one conducted on cow clones, the agency also evaluated the health of offspring sexually derived from swine clones, as well as the composition of their meat. After reviewing this very large data set, the agency concluded that all of the blood values, overall health records, and meat composition profiles of the progeny of clones were in the same range as for very closely genetically related conventionally bred swine. Based on these results, other studies from scientific journals, and our understanding of the biological processes involved in cloning, the agency agreed with NAS that food from the sexually reproduced offspring of clones is as safe as food that we eat every day. We reiterate, however, that the sexually reproduced offspring of clones would produce almost all of the food from the overall cloning/breeding process.

What's next?

FDA's Risk Assessment includes data collected or published before mid-2007. The FDA will continue to monitor closely the development of clones and their progeny as a source for food as further data become available.

What is the National Academy of Sciences?

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was signed into being by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, at the height of the Civil War. As mandated in its Act of Incorporation, the NAS has, since 1863, served to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art" whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government. Scientific issues would become even more contentious and complex in the years following the war. To keep pace with the growing roles that science and technology would play in public life, the institution that was founded in 1863 eventually expanded to include the National Research Council in 1916, the National Academy of Engineering in 1964, and the Institute of Medicine in 1970. Collectively, the four organizations are known as the National Academies. Since 1863, the nation's leaders have often turned to the National Academies for advice on the scientific and technological issues that frequently pervade policy decisions. The Academies and the Institute are honorific societies that elect new members to their ranks each year. The Institute of Medicine also conducts policy studies on health issues, but the bulk of the institution's science policy and technical work is conducted by its operating arm, the National Research Council, created expressly for this purpose. These non-profit organizations provide a public service by working outside the framework of government to ensure independent advice on matters of science, technology, and medicine. They enlist committees of the nation's top scientists, engineers, and other experts--all of whom volunteer their time to study specific concerns. (From the National Academy of Sciences website.)

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A Primer on Cloning and Its Use in Livestock Operations

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The responses to the questions provided in this document represent the FDA's view in light of the conclusions and recommendations outlined in the Animal Cloning Risk Assessment, Risk Management Plan, and Guidance for Industry #179. What is cloning, really? What can go wrong with cloning? Why is there interest in cloning?

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Pet cloning is Bringing Human Cloning a Little Bit Closer. MIT Technology Review

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Pet cloning is Bringing Human Cloning a Little Bit Closer. MIT Technology Review

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Antonio Regalado April 13, 2018

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People are copying pets to preserve a physical, and spiritual, connection to dead children.

When Barbra Streisand revealed to Variety magazine that she'd had her dog cloned for $50,000, many people learned for the first time that copying pets and other animals is a real business.

That's right: you can pay to clone a dog, a horse, or a top beef bull and get a living copy back in a matter of months.

The story that sent shivers up my spine, though, came out a few days later. It was about Monni Must, a Michigan portrait photographer who paid to clone Billy Bean, a Labrador retriever that had belonged to her oldest daughter, Miya.

Miya had committed suicide 10 years earlier. To Must, cloning the elderly dog was a way to keep her daughter's memory alive and, she says, to "protect" her grief.

During the cloning procedure, Must received updates, including sonograms of the developing puppy. The time line seemed full of profound coincidences. Veterinarians detected the clone's heartbeat on Miya's birthday, October 11. The puppy was born in November, the same month Miya killed herself.

"It's a sign. For me, it's a sign that Miya is involved and aware," Must told me.

Alarm bells went off in my head. Must wasn't just cloning a pet. She was trying to preserve a lost child. It seemed awfully close to a real human cloning scenario, one in which a heartbroken parent tries to replace a son or daughter who dies early.

I shot a question to Jose Cibelli, an animal cloning scientist at Michigan State University: Is it time to worry about human cloning again?

Cibelli quickly e-mailed back: "Yes."

Shudder to think

I met Cibelli 15 years ago, when I was among a pack of journalists covering cloning nonstop. Back then, it seemed possible that someone might try to copy a human being at any moment. There was a loud-mouthed Italian fertility doctor named Antinori who said he was trying, and a UFO cult called the Raëlians had a human cloning company, Clonaid; it seemed all too plausible when they pranked the media with claims to have created a clone baby named Eve. In 2002, the National Academies issued an emergency report on the situation.

But human cloning never happened. The reason is clear in retrospect. In the basic cloning procedure, like that used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996, scientists take an entire adult cell and inject it into an egg that's been relieved of its own DNA. The resulting embryo is a clone.

But that process is inefficient. In many animals, only one in 100 cloned embryos ever leads to a live birth. Some embryos expire in the IVF dish. Others wither in the womb. Of those that are born, a few suffer from abnormalities and quickly die.

You would "shudder to think," a 2001 article in the New York Times said, "what might happen if humans are cloned with today's techniques."

Nevertheless, cloning moved forward in cattle and pet dogs. That is because eggs can be collected in large enough numbers to let companies overcome the technology's inherent inefficiency. Failed clones are just a cost of doing business.

The cause of the problems is better understood today. For a skin cell to be a skin cell, it doesn't need the full complement of genes. So many are simply shut off. The reason cloning works at all is that an egg has a remarkable ability to turn genes back on through a process called reprogramming. Yet the egg has only hours to do the job, and some genes are resistant.

It is these resistant genes, still blocked and unavailable to play their role in the developing embryo, that "are believed to be responsible for the demise of clones," Cibelli says.

Something changed

That's also where the recent breakthroughs come in. Cibelli pointed me to the work of Yi Zhang, a stem-cell biologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He said Zhang has found chemicals that, if added to an egg, can help release the blocked genes.

In Zhang's hands, addition of these "modifiers" has led to dramatic improvements in cloning-wiping out barriers present in the adult cells. Zhang first tried it with mice. Instead of about 1 percent of cloned embryos leading to a mouse pup, he says, now 10 percent of them do.

"The gain in efficiency is tremendous," says Zhang, who says he filed a patent based on the discovery.

Zhang then tried the process on human eggs. In 2015, his team recruited four women to have eggs drawn from their ovaries. Into these, they injected skin cells from other people.

Without the gene-releasing molecules, the cloned embryos never developed correctly. With the modifiers, though, about a quarter of them did. "We tried to wipe out the barriers in the adult cells," he says. "Bottom line: we would have failed otherwise."

To be very clear, Zhang isn't planning to make babies. Instead, his objective in cloning speck-size human embryos is to obtain their stem cells. Known as "therapeutic cloning," it's a way to create powerful embryonic stem cells genetically identical to those of the donor adult-say, as a source of replacement tissue.

Therapeutic cloning is not a new idea. Cibelli himself was the first to try it (and fail) 15 years ago. When it didn't work, scientists moved toward other ways of making stem cells by reprogramming skin cells in the lab. Suddenly, though, cloning for stem cells is no longer the wackadoodle scheme it once was. With higher efficiency, doctors might actually use it to make matching tissue for people who can afford it, says Zhang. He's starting a company, NewStem, to begin banking cloned stem cells.

"Before, it was theoretically possible, but you'd have to use a lot of eggs, so it wasn't a reality," says Zhang. "Now, with the efficiency, it becomes a reality."

Monkey clones

We can make cloned human embryos pretty well. Could we go further and grow those embryos into a baby? A clue came in January of 2018, when researchers in China cloned our animal cousins-monkeys-for the first time. Pictures of two cute baby primates, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, quickly spread around the world.

Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo | Chinese Academy of Sciences | Cell Press

Why had the Chinese succeeded where every previous attempt to clone monkeys had failed? The answer was they'd used Zhang's efficiency-enhancing molecules.

Not all the problems have been solved. The Chinese managed to create the animals by starting with skin cells of an aborted monkey fetus. But two other clones, made from an adult animal's cells, died shortly after birth. There's little detail available on why those two monkeys died. But it's a safe bet it was somehow to do with incomplete reprogramming of the adult cells.

In Zhang's view, it would still be crazy and impractical (and illegal) to try to clone a person. Despite the higher efficiency, he notes that Chinese teams used 63 surrogate mothers and 417 eggs to make two monkey clones. Just imagine arranging for dozens of human surrogates and egg donors.

"No society could accept this," says Zhang. "On the other hand, if you are asking me, Can you improve the efficiency even more? Well, the answer is yes. My answer is that eventually, from a technology point of view, human cloning will be possible."

Cloning motivations

Creating a human clone isn't only a question of technology. You'd also need a reason to do it, experts willing to help, and someone to fund it all.

Wildcatting billionaires might be the easiest part to arrange. In March, the CBS program 60 Minutes aired a segment about La Dolfina, an Argentinian polo team whose players all ride copies of the same horse. The entrepreneur behind the horse cloning, Texas businessman D. Alan Meeker, told CBS that he's "been asked by some of the wealthiest people on the planet to clone a human being." Meeker said he'd refused. His reason: no one would tell him why they wanted a clone.

But we know one reason-maybe the most powerful of all. When I spoke by phone to Must, the photographer, she recounted her devastation at her daughter's suicide.

Must had inherited Miya's dog, Billy Bean, and told me the idea of cloning came to her suddenly, years later, when the dog was about to turn 14. "I feared everyone was going to forget Miya, that am I going to forget Miya," Must said. "I thought I was going to lose the dog, and I was literally falling part. It was a lightning bolt: oh my God, I am going to clone her. I was just desperate."

Labrador retriever Billy Bean and her clone, Gunni.

Must eventually had a veterinarian collect a sample of the dog's skin tissue and sent it to a company called PerPETuate. For a $1,300 fee, PerPETuate prepares a cell line from a pet's skin and stores the cells in liquid nitrogen for later cloning. The service is, in effect, an inexpensive way to hold onto an animal's DNA while you decide if you'll pay the full $50,000 cloning cost. PerPETuate founder Ron Gillespie says he's storing frozen tissue from dogs, cats, and even a lion from a Mexican zoo. Must isn't the only person to clone a dog belonging to a dead child, he says. The company will not accept human cells, however. Not from bereaved parents or anyone else.

"We've gotten many requests," says Gillespie. "I say we don't do it. And when people press me where they can do it, I say 'I don't know.' I just totally dismiss it. One of the biggest complaints we have about this is that it is going to lead to human cloning, and people are very opposed to that, beginning with me."

Billy Bean's cells ended up getting shipped to ViaGen Pets, a Texas company that provides the cloning service. In September 2017, Must learned that cloned Billy Bean embryos had been transferred to a canine surrogate. Two months later, she picked up the new puppy. The dog "has a real soul and is everything my daughter was-fun, social, kind, and people gravitate to her," she says. "I feel that I still have that touchable, tactile connection and not just a spiritual connection."

I finally asked Must: Would she have cloned Miya if she'd had the chance?

She said it's not a question she has an answer to. "When you have a child who dies, you are not in a good place. You are not in a place to make a rational decision," she says.

In fact, she admits people thought she'd gone "over the edge" when she resolved to clone the dog. "It was a particularly desperate attempt on my part. My other daughters thought I had lost my marbles," she says. "But it worked. It is kind of scary to think of what this means."

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Pet cloning is bringing human cloning a little bit closer

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When Barbra Streisand revealed to Variety magazine that she'd had her dog cloned for $50,000, many people learned for the first time that copying pets and other animals is a real business. That's right: you can pay to clone a dog, a horse, or a top beef bull and get a living copy back in...

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U.S Commercial Spaceflight: New Milestones

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U.S Commercial Spaceflight: New Milestones

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Janruary 2014

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?vl=en&v=MnYppmstxIs

http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=090c5405-4761-47c7-b09f-c9acd4eed758%40sessionmgr101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=130152209&db=a9h

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Space Tourism? Majority of Americans say they wouldn't be interested

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Space Tourism? Majority of Americans say they wouldn't be interested

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By Mark Strauss and Brian Kennedy
June 7, 2018

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It's summertime, which means Americans are embarking on vacation trips to destinations near and far. One getaway in the "far" category would be a trip to space, something a host of private companies are trying to make possible. But it's not an excursion that appeals to everyone - more U.S. adults say they would not want to orbit the Earth than say they would, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

About four-in-ten Americans (42%) say they would definitely or probably be interested in orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft in the future, while roughly six-in-ten (58%) say they would not be interested.

Once regarded as a topic best suited for science fiction, space tourism is currently under development by private companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.

Interest in being a space tourist is higher among younger generations and men. A majority (63%) of Millennials (born 1981 to 1996) say they would definitely or probably be interested in space tourism. Only minorities of Gen Xers (born 1965 to 1980) (39%) and those in the Baby Boomer or older generations (27%) would be interested.

About half of men (51%) say they would be interested in orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft, compared with one-third of women (33%).

Among the 42% of Americans who said they would be interested in traveling into space, the most common reason given (by 45% of those asked) was to "experience something unique." Smaller shares of this group said they would want to be able to view the Earth from space (29%) or "learn more about the world" (20%).

Among the 58% who said they would not want to orbit the Earth aboard a spacecraft, equal shares said the main reason was that such a trip would be either "too expensive" (28% of those asked) or "too scary" (28%) or that their age or health wouldn't allow it (28%).

Men and women and older and younger Americans cited different reasons for why they would not want to travel into space. Millennials and Gen Xers were more likely to say the main reason they would not be interested was that it would be too expensive or too scary. But for Baby Boomers and older generations, the most common reason they would not be interested in orbiting the Earth was that their age or health would not allow it (of those who were asked this question, 45% of those in the Baby Boomer or older generations said this, compared with 6% of Millennials).

Men were more likely than women to say the main reason they would not be interested in orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft was that it would be too expensive (37% vs. 22%), but women were more inclined than men to say they would not want to go because it would be too scary (34% vs. 18%).

Americans were also asked about their expectations for space tourism in the next 50 years. The public is split over whether this will happen, with half saying that people will routinely travel in space as tourists by 2068 and half saying this will not happen. Americans are more skeptical about the possibility of colonies on other planets - an endeavor championed by space entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. About one-third of Americans (32%) say people will build colonies on other planets that can be lived in for long periods by 2068.

Topics: Emerging Technology Impacts, Science and Innovation

1. Mark Strauss is a writer/editor focusing on science and society at Pew Research Center.

2. Brian Kennedy is a research associate focusing on science and society at Pew Research Center.

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Space tourism? Majority of Americans say they wouldn't be interested

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It's summertime, which means Americans are embarking on vacation trips to destinations near and far. One getaway in the "far" category would be a trip to space, something a host of private companies are trying to make possible. But it's not an excursion that appeals to everyone - more U.S.

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Liz Miller
September 12, 2017

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Space exploration is an exciting and constantly progressing field. Fulfilling natural human curiosity about worlds other than our own, exploration of our solar system and beyond is generally met with support by people from all walks of life. While the bulk of our effort is put into allowing both objects and humans to survive safely on other planets and moons, there is also a need to protect other environments from us. The potential contamination and destruction of other worlds and other life is both a practical and an ethical problem.

Contamination is generally categorized as forward or backward (Rummel, 2001). Backward contamination is contamination of Earth by substances that have been to other bodies in the solar system, and is generally of little concern. Few objects that we send to other planets or moons ever return to Earth, and thus far no other life or transferrable hazards have been found. Forward contamination, on the other hand, has been a concern since the first voyages to Mars by the Viking spacecraft in 1976 (Rummel, 2001). Forward contamination is the contamination of other worlds, and any potential indigenous life, by Earth. We can't know what effect Earth-based life might have on alien life, but the legacy of invasive species and pathogens wreaking havoc on native species on Earth suggests great harm could come of contamination.

Various organizations exist to develop guidelines and rules for preventing forward contamination, including NASA's Office of Planetary Protection and COSPAR, the International Counsel of Science's Committee on Space Research. Since the 1960s these organizations have set various rules about the sterilization of spacecraft and tools sent to other planets, with particular focus on Mars and Europa, two of the most promising and accessible locations for potential alien life. Unfortunately, their guidelines are often based on outdated, arbitrary, or theoretical values of the probability of contamination and damage to alien environments and life (Greenberg & Tufts, 2001). Additionally, it is impossible to completely sterilize spacecraft leaving Earth. When humans travel in those spacecraft, contamination is almost certain (McKay, 2009). Beyond contamination, ethical questions must also be considered about human intervention and research of potential alien life.

The theoretical ethics of planetary protection might play out in different ways, depending on the situation. For comparison, two potential scenarios of contamination and human intervention will be explored here. In the first scenario, small amounts of microbial life are found on Mars. These microbes could actually originate from Earth, as meteorite exchange between the two planets has been fairly common during the history of the solar system (McKay, 2009). In this case, the Martian life may be feeble and have a very high possibility of extinction. Mars is a hostile environment, cold and unprotected from lethal UV radiation (McKay, 2009). Would humans have an obligation to protect Earth-originated life, possibly to the extent of changing Mars into a more nurturing environment? As humans we tend to value life and work to protect it, but in this case that might mean forever altering the abiotic Martian environment. Interfering in the course of Martian evolution might sound amoral to some, but others would argue that standing by and letting a unique form of life become extinct would be worse. This is, of course, assuming that well-intentioned interference would not result in lethal contamination, which is practically impossible to prevent. Additionally, what is the difference between Earth-originating life that was introduced by meteorite or life that was introduced by spacecraft? At what point does that life become truly Martian?

In a very different scenario, a voyage to Europa, a Jovian moon with a high potential for liquid oceans that could support life, results in the discovery of a complex and highly developed ecosystem of living organisms. Many scientists believe Europa has the highest possibility of non-terrestrial life in our solar system (Greenberg & Tufts, 2001). In this case, the ethical question would not be whether or not to protect this life, but whether or not to study it. Exploring the universe and learning more about it is generally considered unproblematic and even necessary for the advancement of humans. However, studying alien life creates a paradox. It is impossible to know how to prevent harm without knowing anything about what is being studied- and scientists can only know about something by studying it. In attempting to learn how Europan life might be vulnerable to Earth pathogens, researchers would risk destroying an entire ecosystem with non-sterile tools. Consider how diseases innocuous to Europeans decimated entire indigenous populations in the Americas. The basis of this ethical problem is not knowing how our actions, no matter how noble in intent, might affect life so fundamentally different from ourselves.

Clearly, the problem of planetary protection goes far beyond simply preventing contamination. As space exploration allows us to travel farther from Earth and explore more worlds, we will need policies and protocols to guide us and allow us to learn more about the universe in an ethical way. One possible way to protect other environments is to only send robots, not humans. This may be disappointing to those who dream of walking on an alien world, but the effectiveness of sterilization is so much greater for robots that this may be the only ethical way to continue exploration. Additionally, learning from our own history and mistakes on Earth may help guide us towards thoughtful and preventative policies. As the two examples explained above demonstrate, it is difficult to design policies that encompass the wide range of possible scenarios in which other worlds need protection from humans. Despite the difficulty of this task, it is essential that we have these discussions, and that people from all walks of life and around the world have a voice in designing guidelines for space exploration. Somewhere between the extremes of exploring without care for contamination or other harm, and stopping space exploration altogether, there might be a set of protocols which minimize destruction and allow us to continue to satisfy our curiosity and drive for discovery.

Works Cited
Greenberg, R., & B. R. Tufts. 2001. Macroscope: Infecting Other Worlds. American Scientist 89(4): 296-299.
McKay, C. P. 2009. Biologically Reversible Exploration. American Association for the Advancement of Science 323(5915): 718.
Rummel, J. D. 2001. Planetary Exploration in the Time of Astrobiology: Protecting against Biological Contamination. Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences 98(5): 2128-2131.

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Space exploration is an exciting and constantly progressing field. Fulfilling natural human curiosity about worlds other than our own, exploration of our solar system and beyond is generally met with support by people from all walks of life.

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Nicholas Gerbis
March 27, 2016

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Imagine that the machines and structures we use every day, from particleboard bookshelves to apartment blocks, could assemble themselves. No more Ikea hex wrenches, no more cranes, just 3-D-printed materials that "know" how to fold, curl and stiffen, like plants growing in a time-lapse video.

In other words, what if we could print objects that were four-dimensional?

OK, sure, technically everything is four-dimensional - actually, 10-or-more- dimensional, according to physicists - but we mainly think of the built world in terms of length, width and height. The fourth dimension, time, we see as the enemy, the effects of which we do our best to resist (experts remain split as to whether the fifth dimension is "The Twilight Zone" or the band that sang "The Age of Aquarius").

And so we build walls and pipes as strong as we can - and keep repairing them as they age - because construction takes time, money and effort, and we don't want to do it over and over again. But what if time weren't the enemy? Suppose a structure could unfold itself, like origami. Imagine if its walls could flex or stiffen in response to shifting loads, or if a buried pipe could change shape to accommodate varying water flows - or to pump water via peristalsis, like your digestive system. Through 4-D printing, nothing is set in stone unless you want it to be.

If researchers and manufacturers can get it to work, 4-D printing could change our entire idea of manufacturing. Companies could print shelters, machines and tools, then flat-pack them and ship them where needed - disaster areas, perhaps, or prepare them for hostile environments like space or the ocean floor. There, environmental conditions harmful to humans might actually power the object's changes in shape and properties - not just once, but repeatedly.

At the heart of it all lie the basic physics, chemistry and geometry behind the most mundane natural processes. Consider how your hair changes shape as a storm rolls in, a simple matter of airborne water causing keratin proteins to form an unusually high proportion of hydrogen bonds, which cause them fold back instead of stretch out [source: Stromberg]. Or think of how a flat inflatable chair assumes a predictable shape as it takes in air because its sections have different properties.

Four-dimensional devices do not require humans to build them, nor are they robots that require microchips, servos and armatures to work. Their sole "programming" involves the geometry, physics and chemistry embedded in their structures.

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Imagine that the machines and structures we use every day, from particleboard bookshelves to apartment blocks, could assemble themselves. No more Ikea hex wrenches, no more cranes, just 3-D-printed materials that "know" how to fold, curl and stiffen, like plants growing in a time-lapse video.

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Design and 4D printing Cross-Folded origami Structures: A Preliminary Investigation

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Design and 4D printing Cross-Folded origami Structures: A Preliminary Investigation

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Joanne Ee Mei Teoh, Jia An, Xiaofan Feng, Yue Zhao, Chee Kai Chua, and young Liu
March 1,2018

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Here's why we're not cloning humans, 20 years after Dolly the sheep

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Here's why we're not cloning humans, 20 years after Dolly the sheep

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-Sharon Begley, Business Insider
-7/5/2016

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Dolly, the first animal to be cloned from an adult of its species, was born 20 years ago today at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.

When her creators announced what they had done, it triggered warnings of rich people cloning themselves for spare parts, of tyrants cloning soldiers for armies, of bereaved parents cloning their dead child to produce a replacement - and promises that the technique would bring medical breakthroughs. Which raises some questions:

Why are there no human clones?

Because of scientific, ethical, and commercial reasons.

The scientists who created Dolly - named after Dolly Parton, naturally - removed the DNA from a sheep ovum, fused the ovum with a mammary epithelial cell from an adult "donor" sheep, and transplanted the result, now carrying DNA only from the donor, into a surrogate ewe. But that technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), turned out not to be so easy in other species.

"I think no one realized how hard cloning would be in some species though relatively easy in others," said legal scholar and bioethicist Hank Greely of Stanford University. "Cats: easy; dogs: hard; mice: easy; rats: hard; humans and other primates: very hard."

There has also been no commercial motive for human cloning. Both the assisted reproduction (IVF) and pharmaceutical industries "immediately said they had no interest in human cloning," said bioethicist George Annas of Boston University. "That was a big deal. All new technologies are driven by the profit motive," absent which they tend to languish.

The Raelians (a cult that believes humans are the clones of aliens) claimed in 2002 that they had cloned a baby from a 31-year-old American woman, but for some reason the now 13-year-old "Eve" has never stepped forward to claim her place in history.

But surely someone has made money from Dolly-like cloning work?

Livestock cloning has become a commercial business, with ViaGen- part of biotech company Intrexon - cloning cattle, sheep, and pigs. It also clones pets. But it's not a huge business.

In South Korea, biologist Woo Suk Hwang rebounded from scandal (in 2004, he fraudulently claimed to have cloned a human embryo) to clone hundreds of dogs, cows, pigs, and even coyotes. Price for Fido Redux: about $100,000, Nature reported.

While pet cloning "remains very expensive and very uncommon," said Greely, "the world's best polo pony team is made up of clones." The thoroughbred racing industry bans clones, however.

Did Dolly start a revolution?

If you count by scientific publications, sure: There were only about 60 papers on somatic cell nuclear transfer in the decade before her birth, most of them describing (failed) attempts to use it to produce prized cattle and other commercial livestock, and 5,870 in the decade after, many of them reporting progress toward medical uses of SCNT.

Where are those medical breakthroughs?

They were premised on what's called therapeutic cloning, to distinguish it from reproductive cloning. The idea is to take a cell from a patient, put its DNA into an ovum whose own DNA was removed, and get the ovum to begin dividing and multiplying in a lab dish, eventually producing specialized cells like neurons and pancreatic beta cells. Those cells could be used for basic research, such as to follow how a disease like ALS develops at the cellular level, or for therapy.

In 2013, a team led by reproductive biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University used somatic cell nuclear transfer to create a human cell line. There hasn't been enough time since then for the rest of the therapeutic cloning promise to be realized.

2013? Why did it take so long?

Some animals turned out to be much harder to clone than others, and humans are really tough. It wasn't until 2014 that scientists, led by Dieter Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, used a variation on the Dolly recipe to create the first disease-specific cell lines from a patient, with type 1 diabetes. The donor's DNA plus a DNA-free egg produced a line of cells Egli is using to grow insulin-producing beta cells that match the donor precisely, minimizing the chance of rejection. "Now you have cells that are genetically identical to the donor, which will allow us to make patient-specific cells for transplant," Egli said. "We're three-quarters of the way there, and that breakthrough is due to Dolly."

So Dolly deserves the credit if such cells start to be used to cure diabetes and other diseases?

Sort of. Competing techniques, especially "reprogramming" adult cells so they can turn into (potentially) diabetes-curing beta cells and others, have diminished interest in SCNT, since it's so much harder to pull off. But it was Dolly who showed not only that mammalian cloning can work, but also that "there is something in the egg that could take an adult cell [the sheep mammary cell] backwards in time and restore it to an embryonic state" able to become a whole new creature, said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "This is what spurred the discovery of iPS [induced pluripotent stem] cells," the reprogrammed adult cells that might finally make stem-cell medicine a reality.

Did Dolly have effects outside medicine?

Yes, for endangered species. Lanza and his team adapted the Dolly-making technique to clone endangered species. The first, a gaur, was born in 2001, and their banteng (a species of wild ox) was born in 2003. Both died within days, but efforts are underway to clone such endangered species as the black-footed ferret, possibly the northern white rhino, giant pandas,- and also extinct animals such as the passenger pigeon and mammoth, Lanza said: "We're likely to see de-extinction become a reality in our lifetime."

Where is Dolly now?

After developing a lung disease called jaagsiekte, she was euthanized on Feb. 14, 2003, stuffed, and put on display at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where you can find her in a new science gallery starting on Friday.

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Here's why we're still not cloning humans, 20 years after Dolly the sheep

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Dolly, the first animal to be cloned from an adult of its species, was born 20 years ago today at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. When her creators announced what they had done, it triggered warnings of rich people cloning themselves for spare parts, of tyrants cloning soldiers for armies, of bereaved parents cloning their dead child to produce a replacement - and promises that the technique would bring medical breakthroughs.

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Author: John Antczak 2016

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Virgin Galactic later this month in Mojave, California, is preparing to roll out its new SpaceShipTwo, a vehicle the company hopes will one day take tourists to the edge of space. It comes roughly 15½ months since an earlier ...

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Artificial Intelligence and the Cybernetic Revolution

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Artificial Intelligence and the Cybernetic Revolution

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https://www.artandeducation.net/classroom/66065/artificial-intelligence-and-the-cybernetic-revolution

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Crispr's Effects on Plant Life and Agriculture

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Crispr's Effects on Plant Life and Agriculture

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Direct 4D printing via active composite materials

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Direct 4D printing via active composite materials

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ScienceAdvances Magazine
April 2017

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Direct 4D printing via active composite materials

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We describe an approach to print composite polymers in high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) architectures that can be rapidly transformed to a new permanent configuration directly by heating.

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First space tourist flights could come in 2019

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First space tourist flights could come in 2019

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By Ivan Couronne
July 13, 2018

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July 13, 2018 by Ivan Couronne

The Virgin Galactic VSS Unity, seen during a test flight over the Mojave desert in California on May 29, 2018

The two companies leading the pack in the pursuit of space tourism say they are just months away from their first out-of-this-world passenger flights-though neither has set a firm date.

Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, are racing to be the first to finish their tests-with both companies using radically different technology.
Moments of weightlessness
Neither Virgin nor Blue Origin's passengers will find themselves orbiting the Earth: instead, their weightless experience will last just minutes. It's an offering far different from the first space tourists, who paid tens of millions of dollars to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) in the 2000s.

Having paid for a much cheaper ticket-costing $250,000 with Virgin, as yet unknown with Blue Origin-the new round of space tourists will be propelled dozens of miles into the atmosphere, before coming back down to Earth. By comparison, the ISS is in orbit 250 miles (400 kilometers) from our planet.

The goal is to approach or pass through the imaginary line marking where space begins-either the Karman line, at 100 kilometers or 62 miles, or the 50-mile boundary recognized by the US Air Force.

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity will be attached to a carrier spacecraft, from which it will then detach at around 49,000 feet (15,000 meters)

At this altitude, the sky looks dark and the curvature of the earth can be seen clearly.
Virgin Galactic
With Virgin Galactic, six passengers and two pilots are boarded onto SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, which resembles a private jet.

The VSS Unity will be attached to a carrier spacecraft-the WhiteKnightTwo-from which it will then detach at around 49,000 feet (15,000 meters.) Once released, the spaceship will fire up its rocket, and head for the sky.

Then, the passengers will float in zero-gravity for several minutes, before coming back to Earth.

The descent is slowed down by a "feathering" system that sees the spacecraft's tail pivot, as if arching, before returning to normal and gliding to land at Virgin's "spaceport" in the New Mexico desert.

Blue Origin has developed a system similar to a traditional rocket: the New Shepard

In total, the mission lasts between 90 minutes and two hours. During a May 29 test in California's Mojave desert, the spaceship reached an altitude of 21 miles, heading for space.

In October 2014, the Virgin spaceship broke down in flight due to a piloting error, killing one of two pilots on board. The tests later resumed with a new craft.

The company has now also reached a deal to open a second "spaceport" at Italy's Tarente-Grottaglie airport, in the south of the country.

Branson in May told BBC Radio 4 that he hoped to himself be one of the first passengers in the next 12 months. About 650 people make up the rest of the waiting list, Virgin told AFP.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin, meanwhile, has developed a system closer to the traditional rocket: the New Shepard.

Six passengers will take their place in a "capsule" fixed to the top of Blue Origin's 60-foot-long rocket

On this journey, six passengers take their place in a "capsule" fixed to the top of a 60-foot-long rocket. After launching, it detaches and continues its trajectory several miles toward the sky. During an April 29 test, the capsule made it 66 miles.

After a few minutes of weightlessness, during which passengers can take in the view through large windows, the capsule gradually falls back to earth with three large parachutes and retrorockets used to slow the spacecraft.

From take-off to landing, the flight took 10 minutes during the latest test.

Until now, tests have only been carried out using dummies at Blue Origin's West Texas site.

But one of its directors, Rob Meyerson, said in June the first human tests would come "soon."

Meanwhile, another company official, Yu Matsutomi, said during a conference Wednesday that the first tests with passengers would take place "at the end of this year," according to Space News.

SpaceX's Dragon capsule, seen here in a cargo configuration, during a NASA mission to the International Space Station in July 2018

What's next?
SpaceX and Boeing are developing their own capsules to transport NASA astronauts, most likely in 2020, after delays-a significant investment that the companies will likely make up for by offering private passenger flights.

"If you're looking to go to space, you'll have quadruple the menu of options that you ever had before," Phil Larson, assistant dean at the University of Colorado, Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Science, told AFP.

Longer term, the Russian firm that manufactures Soyuz rockets is studying the possibility of taking tourists back to the ISS. And a US start-up called Orion Span announced earlier this year it hopes to place a luxury space hotel into orbit within a few years-but the project is still in its early stages.

© 2018 AFP

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First space tourist flights could come in 2019

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July 13, 2018 by Ivan Couronne The two companies leading the pack in the pursuit of space tourism say they are just months away from their first out-of-this-world passenger flights-though neither has set a firm date.

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Welcome to Britannica School , a safe, up-to-date, and age-appropriate information resource for Elementary, Middle, and High School.

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Title:  Law as computation in the era of artificial legal intelligence: Speaking law to the power of statistics
Author: Mireille Hildebrandt
Date January 1, 2018

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Rhino Embryos Made in Lab to Save Nearly Extinct Subspecies

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Rhino Embryos Made in Lab to Save Nearly Extinct Subspecies

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Steph Yin
July 4, 2018

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The development is an early step toward the much more distant goal of resurrecting the northern white rhinoceros, whose last male died this year.

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Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, who died in March. Credit Dai Kurokawa/EPA, via Shutterstock

If you had asked Thomas Hildebrandt a decade ago whether the northern white rhinoceros could be saved, his answer would have been grim. The rhino's numbers had dwindled to single digits, and the few remaining individuals all had severe reproductive issues.

"We thought, 'The story's over,'" said Dr. Hildebrandt, a wildlife reproductive biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and the Free University of Berlin. His prognosis got even bleaker when Sudan, the last male of the subspecies, died in captivity last spring.

But on Wednesday, Dr. Hildebrandt and a team of colleagues reported in the journal Nature Communications that the story of the northern white rhino is not, in fact, over.

Using frozen sperm from northern white rhinos and eggs from closely related southern white rhinos, the scientists created hybrid embryos that can potentially be implanted into surrogate southern white rhino mothers.

This lab achievement is a very early step toward the much longer-term goal of resurrecting a population of full-blooded northern white rhinos, said Jan Stejskal, director of international projects at the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic and an author of the paper, in a press briefing on Tuesday.

Multiple teams around the world are now working collaboratively on high-tech options for bringing back the northern white rhino, which is now functionally extinct. Only two females, a mother-daughter pair named Najin and Fatu, are still alive at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
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One avenue is in vitro fertilization with northern white rhino eggs and sperm. This would involve producing early embryos in petri dishes that could then be transferred to develop in surrogate southern white rhinos, another subspecies.

Dr. Hildebrandt and his collaborators started to investigate this possibility. They had frozen sperm samples from four northern white males, and successfully used one sample to fertilize eggs from two southern white females, creating four hybrid embryos in total. Additionally, they created three full southern white rhino embryos.

The next step is to implant the southern white or hybrid embryos into surrogates, which should happen in the coming months, said Cesare Galli, founder and managing director of Avantea, a reproductive biotechnology company based in Italy, and an author of the paper.

If that succeeds, the researchers will appeal to Kenyan authorities to let them harvest eggs from Najin and Fatu, then fertilize the females' eggs with stored northern white rhino sperm. The team hopes to see the first purebred northern white rhino born to a surrogate through this method in three years, Dr. Hildebrandt said.

One major drawback to this tactic is that the genetic pool from just two northern white cows and four bulls is extremely limited, and would likely lead to severe inbreeding.

Because of this, Dr. Hildebrandt's team and a group led by researchers at San Diego Zoo Global are also exploring another approach, using so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (also known as iPS cells). Such cells have been reprogrammed into blank canvases - they can become any other cell type in the body, including egg and sperm cells.

The strategy is promising because researchers have already generated iPS cells (though not egg and sperm cells yet) from northern white rhino skin cells, and because the San Diego Zoo has a genetically diverse collection of skin cells from 12 northern white rhinos.

Earlier reporting on rhinoceroses

The trade-off is that the iPS cell technology will take longer to develop - perhaps a decade or so, Dr. Hildebrandt estimated.

In the meantime, it's important to pursue the more immediate possibility of in vitro fertilization with Najin and Fatu's eggs, he said, particularly if potential calves are to be raised around or socialized by the two northern white females in their lifetimes.

Conservation scientists widely applauded the technical sophistication of the new study, but several expressed concerns about relying too much on high-tech solutions.

It's still "a long road from creating an embryo to having a viable birth - and then an even longer path from succeeding once to creating a herd of rhinos," said Susie Ellis, executive director of the International Rhino Foundation.

She worried that technology can be "the shiny object in the room" that takes focus away from protecting habitat or supporting crucial, on-the-ground conservation efforts for remainingrhinos.

Terri Roth, director of the Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife at the Cincinnati Zoo, said that saving the northern white rhino - or any species - will ultimately require multiple facets.

"We should all be working on as many strategies as possible," she said. "Let's not throw any one out, because you just can't predict what's going to happen. We need all the help we can get."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing Back the Northern White Rhino. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Rhino Embryos Made in Lab to Save Nearly Extinct Subspecies

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The development is an early step toward the much more distant goal of resurrecting the northern white rhinoceros, whose last male died this year. If you had asked Thomas Hildebrandt a decade ago whether the northern white rhinoceros could be saved, his answer would have been grim.

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Monkey Clones Created in the Lab. Now What?

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Monkey Clones Created in the Lab. Now What?

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Michael Greshko
January 24, 2018

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In a world first, Chinese researchers have successfully cloned macaques using the same technique that yielded the famous clone Dolly the sheep. The milestone, published in Cell on Wednesday, marks the first time that primates have ever been cloned in such a manner.

The years-long effort, led by Chinese Academy of Sciences postdoctoral fellow Zhen Liu, culminated in the recent birth of two female macaques, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. The macaques' names are drawn from the word zhonghua, an adjective for the Chinese people.

The two macaques-eight weeks and six weeks old-are genetically identical, both clones of the same donor culture of fetal monkey cells. The young monkeys are reportedly healthy and currently live in an incubator.

The discovery potentially leads to a brave new world of biomedical research and will unquestionably spark debate over cloning another primate species: humans. Here's everything you need to know about these potentially controversial clones.

ARE THESE THE FIRST CLONED MONKEYS?

Technically, no. In 1999, researchers "cloned" a rhesus macaque by splitting an early-stage macaque embryo into multiple parts-in effect, creating artificial identical twins. Other research showed that monkey cells could be cloned to create lines of stem cells. However, these efforts yielded only cells confined to petri dishes, not fully developed monkeys.

"It's about time, because I thought it would never happen," says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the head of Oregon Health and Science University's Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy. He wasn't involved with the study, but he worked on previous monkey-cloning efforts.

SO WHY IS THIS A BIG DEAL?

In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal cloned using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Unlike embryo splitting, which can only yield a few copies, this method can theoretically produce an indefinite number of clones from a single donor. This lets researchers craft customizable, genetically uniform populations of animals with potential for biomedical research.

Since then, scientists have cloned more than 20 species-from cows to rabbits to dogs-using this technique, but the Chinese effort marks the first time that non-human primates have been cloned successfully in the same way. This is a big deal, because the cloning technique in this study may apply to other primates such as humans. However, the study's authors stress that they have no intention of cloning humans.

HOW DOES THIS CLONING METHOD WORK?

In animals such as sheep and monkeys, individuals have a bundle inside every cell called a nucleus, which contains a copy of their distinct genetic code. Somatic cell nuclear transfer involves delicately transferring the nucleus from one animal's cell into another animal's egg.

They then chemically prod the egg into developing, as if it had been naturally fertilized. If this embryo reaches a certain stage of development, scientists can then implant it into the surrogate. If the procedure is successful, the surrogate will get pregnant and give birth to an animal that is genetically identical to the nucleus donor.

WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO CLONE PRIMATES THIS WAY?

The full process isn't as simple as plucking a nucleus out of a skin cell, plugging it into an egg, and expecting it to form a flawless clone. As embryonic cells differentiate into skin, muscle, and other tissues, their DNA gets spooled, bunched up, and tagged so that only specific genes are expressed within any given cell type. It's a bit like reading a choose-your-own-adventure book, settling on a particular plot you like, and gluing together the pages you skipped.

To increase the odds of success, researchers must nudge the donor nucleus's DNA into resembling the DNA of a young embryo. Turning back this genetic clock requires complex chemical protocols that must be fine-tuned for individual species. In part, this is why monkey cloning long proved elusive. The team in China tried several versions of the method before one worked, says study coauthor Qiang Sun, director of the Nonhuman Primate Research Facility at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience.

Sun's team temporarily bathed the clone eggs in trichostatin A, a compound that helped ensure the donor DNA didn't bunch up. They also prodded the eggs to make enzymes that snipped certain chemical tags off the donor DNA, freeing up locked embryonic genes. The researchers also tried creating clones from both adult and fetal cells, but only clones derived from fetal cells survived. It's thought that the fetal cells were less "hardened" into their cell types than the adult cells, but because the fetal cells were differentiated, they too required reprogramming.

WHY CLONE MONKEYS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

The researchers say that they want to use this technique to breed macaques for biomedical research. Exact genetic copies of the same animal would reduce the variability in results when testing new drugs or other therapies.

"For the cloning of primate species, including humans, the technical barrier is now broken," says study coauthor Mu-Ming Poo, who directs the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "However, the reason we chose to break this barrier is to produce animal models that are useful for human medicine. There's no intention to apply this method to humans."

Koen Van Rompay, a virologist at the California National Primate Research Center, thinks that such clones would be useful in the long run: "If there would be an efficient way to clone monkeys, that could actually reduce the number of monkeys needed to answer a certain research question," he says.

Van Rompay and Mitalipov caution, however, that the promised therapeutic benefits may not be right around the corner. For one, the technique doesn't strike them as particularly efficient. Of the team's 21 cloning attempts using fetal donor cells, only two resulted in healthy live births. What's more, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are only two months old. Researchers don't yet know what infirmities, if any, will afflict them later in life as a result of being cloned.

"This is just a step," says Van Rompay. "We are not ready to clone monkeys large-scale."

BUT IS IT ETHICAL TO MAKE CLONES?

The use of non-human primates as lab animals has long been contentious. Animal-welfare groups have cast experiments on non-human primates as cruel, exactly because of the animals' similarities to humans. They also express concern over cloning itself, pointing to miscarriages, sterile social environments, human hand-raising, and other unnatural stressors.

"It gives this sense that animals are disposable and commodities for us to use," says Kathleen Conlee, vice president of animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States. "Is this appropriate, to have an animal you can do whatever you want to? ... It creates a poor dynamic about how we treat animals overall."

China, in particular, faces high scrutiny on matters of animal welfare because it has no comprehensive laws against animal cruelty. The study authors say that their facilities follow animal-welfare regulations set by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and that they are attentive to the macaques' welfare.

It's possible that improvements in genetics and computer modeling will limit the need for lab monkeys, says Eliza Bliss-Moreau, a behavioral neuroscientist at the California National Primate Research Center. "Technology has advanced so much in the last decade," she says. "Some of the questions that you would think of in behavioral neuroscience as being targets for [cloning], we're already tackling in other ways."

But many biomedical researchers insist that primate models are still necessary for studying complex human diseases and disorders, from Parkinson's to HIV/AIDS to autism. "I don't think there will ever be a way we can avoid non-human primates in biomedical research," says Van Rompay. "If that happens, that would be great, but right now, in-vitro and computer models are not sufficient."

Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn, an expert on the use of primates in biomedical research, says that the questions this new study poses are complex: "Should we invest in this or organs on a chip? I don't think it's that simple."

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CLONING HUMANS?

In short, this study suggests that human cloning could be technically possible in a matter of months to years. "The genie's out of the bottle now," says Jose Cibelli, a cloning expert at Michigan State University who wasn't involved with this study.

Whether reproductive human cloning should proceed, however, is another question entirely. All of the scientists interviewed by National Geographic stressed that at present, human cloning would be unnecessary and irresponsible. "There's no reason to clone humans at this time," says Poo. "There must be international discussion on this issue."

Bioethicist Kahn urges a global discussion, as well: "What should we do about it-the 'we' being societies, countries, oversight bodies, governments?" he says. "What kind of governance do we think is necessary to prevent bad things from happening to humans, in the context of technology like this?"

WHAT'S NEXT?

The Chinese research team says that they will monitor the long-term health of Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, including the pair's brain development. The coauthors also say that the government of Shanghai strongly supports their research and is underwriting plans to expand their laboratory by more than tenfold. In addition, they expressed hope that Chinese society-which is rapidly shifting its views on animal welfare-will keep an open mind to conducting research on non-human primates.

"With all this improvement, along with the high standards of ethical concerns, I think that Chinese society will accept this," says Poo. "I hope that societies in Western countries will realize once we demonstrate the cloned monkeys' usefulness in curing disease, they will gradually change their mind."

Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify Kathleen Conlee's stance on cloning.

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Monkey Clones Created in the Lab. Now What?

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In a world first, Chinese researchers have successfully cloned macaques using the same technique that yielded the famous clone Dolly the sheep. The milestone, published in Cell on Wednesday, marks the first time that primates have ever been cloned in such a manner.

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Title:  AI Explained in 101 Seconds
Author: Gary Brotman
Date: September 25, 2017

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Doesn't work on complex traits and is risky

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Doesn't work on complex traits and is risky

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Protein Engineering Strategies to Expand CRISPR-Cas9 Applications: EBSCOhost