Clones that do not look alike?? whaaaa?

[SoCalDem]

Hmmm..maybe the "good doctor" went to a husky breeder and found two puppies:):rofl:


By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: December 31, 2008

Fairfax, Calif.

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

HOWLING TIME Mira, left, and MissyToo appear to be a tough audience for Lou Hawthorne, who had them cloned from the DNA of his mother’s dog.

THE most difficult thing about the cloned puppies is not telling them apart, but explaining why they don’t look exactly alike. This was the problem Lou Hawthorne faced on a recent afternoon hike with Mira and MissyToo, two dogs whose embryos were created from the preserved, recycled and repurposed nuclear DNA of the original Missy, a border collie-husky mix who died in 2002.

To be sure, they have a very strong resemblance to each other and to Missy. It’s just that sometimes, as soon as people hear that the dogs are clones, the questions start coming:

“Why is one dog’s fur curlier?”

“Why aren’t the dogs the same size?”

“Why is one of them darker?”

“Why does this one have a floppy ear?”

Mr. Hawthorne, who is 48, is highly invested in the notion of likeness. With clones, after all, what good does similar do? It is Mr. Hawthorne’s biotech company, BioArts, which is based here in the Bay Area but has arrangements with a laboratory in South Korea, that performed the actual cloning.

He also has particular reason to be sensitive to questions that touch on the authenticity of the clones, given the history of his chief geneticist, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea. Dr. Hwang is perhaps best known for fraudulently reporting in 2004 that a team he led had successfully cloned human embryos and stem cells. After the false claims were unearthed, he was fired by Seoul National University, where he did his research as a professor. But he is also widely acknowledged for having been involved in successfully cloning an Afghan hound in 2005.

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[Quantess]

1. Looks like he got conned.

;)

[Lasher]

2. Caveat emptor

This dumbass paid Hwang Woo Suk to do cloning? Who's handling his investments this year, Bernie Madoff?

[eridani]

3. Not sure about dogs, but with cats, color is a sex-linked trait

You get calico cats when a ginger X or Y meets up with a black X or Y. A calico mom can only have black and white or orange and white sons. Furthermore, genes have only loose control over embryonic development. A color spot on a cat is a clone of a single cell, and the range of timing for gene expression can be loose.

Imagine a balloon only a little blown up. Draw a one inch color spot on it, and blow the balloon all the way up. If you start with a balloon with more air in it at first and then draw a one inch spot on it, the size of the final spot on the balloon will be much smaller. Also, on a female calico, X chromosomes collapse into Barr bodies in a completely random fashion. Half the time it's the one with orange coding and the other half black. Add both of those processes together, and it's clear that the pattern of the cat is not genetically determined; just the colors.

A Siamese cat is basically a black or other-colored cat one of whose melanin production genes have been altered to be temperature dependent. Therefore the melanin appears on the coldest parts of the kitteh--tail, nose and feet.

[TexasProgresive]

4. Some things such as coloration

are affected by conditions in the womb. Clones are exact genetic copies but not necessarily exact visual duplicates. And as to size - I know a pair of identical twin girls who had a marked weight difference at birth that continued as the grew.