Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (38 page)

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Yorktown Technologies conducted “comprehensive” studies of the glowing tetra, Blake says, which revealed that the fluorescent tetra were less environmentally fit—and thus less likely to survive in the wild—than their unmodified counterparts. The company submitted this data to the FDA, which raised no objections to commercial sale of the fish, Blake says.

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The EU approved ATryn in 2006, and the United States followed suit in 2009. The gap in approval dates means that for three years, goats in Massachusetts were making medicine that could be prescribed only abroad.

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Scientists have also created genetically modified plants and bacteria that can produce some of these compounds. (In 1982, insulin produced by modified bacteria became the first genetically engineered drug approved by the FDA.) But many human proteins are complex—in order to work, they have to be folded correctly and adorned with special molecules—and animal cells are better than plants and bacteria at putting these finishing touches on a protein.

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Microinjection has traditionally been the most commonly used technique for creating a transgenic animal, but it’s not the only one. Scientists can also use modified viruses to infiltrate embryos and deliver transgenes. Alternately, they can insert a new gene into embryonic stem cells growing in the lab. These cells are then injected into an embryo; as the fetus grows, the adulterated stem cells will develop into tissues containing the new gene.

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In Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of hunting, wild animals, and childbirth.

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Murray and Maga haven’t quite decided what the distribution system will be should the goat milk make it onto the market, though Maga says they probably won’t sell the transgenic goat technology, or the rights to the milk, to a pharmaceutical company. Instead, she says, she and Murray have discussed partnering with a nonprofit organization to parcel out the milk.

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In fact, these GM animals are beginning to take over scientific laboratories. Since 1995, the number of “genetically normal” animals used in British labs has decreased slightly, while the ranks of genetically engineered animals have grown more than sixfold. In 2010, 43 percent of all lab procedures performed in the United Kingdom involved GM animals. And Japan’s labs are home to 3.6 million genetically modified mice. (While the USDA issues an annual report on the number of animals used in research, it does not break down animal usage by genetically modified status.)

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Not all such transplants were for life-threatening conditions. Take the popular procedure pioneered by the French surgeon Serge Voronoff. In the 1920s, he began performing an operation that he believed would keep aging men feeling young and vibrant. All an elderly fella had to do was get a thin slice of ape or monkey testicle sewed inside his scrotum. Thousands of men all over the world underwent the procedure, which was so popular that Voronoff worried about having enough animals to meet demand. (Learning that Voronoff also transplanted monkey ovaries into aging women is the first thing that has ever made me feel grateful to live in the age of Botox. Suddenly, injecting botulinum toxin into my face doesn’t sound so bad.)

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Polls reveal that between 97 and 99 percent of Americans at least occasionally eat animal flesh, and our appetite for meat is increasing—today, the average American eats a staggering 240 pounds of meat annually, up from 176 pounds in 1975.

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In the popular media, and public discussion, any creature that is part human and part animal is often referred to as a “hybrid,” but technically, a human-animal hybrid is a very specific kind of creature: one created by fertilizing an animal egg with a human sperm (or vice versa). The most infamous attempt to create such a hybrid came courtesy of the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov. In 1927, Ivanov tried to impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm, but when that didn’t yield any tiny humanzees, he formulated a new strategy: He would inseminate Soviet women with sperm from Tarzan, a twenty-six-year-old orangutan. Happily for the women of the USSR, Ivanov was captured by the secret police before he could carry out this plan.

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That said, culture plays a role in how we view these human-animal combos. African scientists and policymakers have warned Murray and Maga that their transgenic goats may not be popular in certain African nations. In some cultures, the researchers were told, people would view the single lysozyme gene as enough to make the goats partly human and would consider consuming any part of those creatures to be a form of cannibalism.

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In the same report that recommended proceeding cautiously—or perhaps not at all—when it came to creating animals with human genetic material in their brains, the Academy of Medical Sciences concluded that “the great majority” of experiments involving animals engineered to carry human genes “pose no novel issues.”

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There’s been some confusion about this name over the years, with many news outlets reporting—erroneously, according to Westhusin—that CC stands for “Copy Cat.”

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Some years ago, Kraemer tells me, “a zoo brought a pair of lion cubs into the clinic and they only wanted one of them back.” So, until A&M could build a suitable facility for her, Delilah the lion lived in the Kraemers’ backyard.

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Errors in genetic reprogramming may also alter gene activity in a clone and account for differences between a clone and its genetic donor.

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Hwang has also been accused of fraud in connection with his claim, in 2004, of having cloned human embryos. (He was ultimately convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but not of fraud.) Hwang reportedly admitted to falsifying data, and two of his landmark papers were retracted. His dog data, however, appears to be legit. (A spokesperson for BioArts defended the company’s association with Hwang to
The Guardian:
“As a cloning company,” he said, “we believe in second chances.”)

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Several experts have gone so far as to suggest that the secret to the South Koreans’ success is the nation’s appetite for dogs. Since the failure rates are high, a successful cloning attempt requires lots and lots of canine embryos. The Koreans have an advantage, some have said, because they have access to more dogs—and can harvest eggs from the canines being farmed or sold for their meat.

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The winner of the Golden Clone Giveaway was James Symington and his German shepherd Trakr, a search-and-rescue dog who worked the rubble of the World Trade Center in September 2001. Symington eventually received five clones of Trakr and founded Team Trakr, a nonprofit that will send teams of search-and-rescue dogs to assist in a variety of emergencies. All five of Trakr’s genetic doubles are being trained to participate.

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Hawthorne countered some of these concerns by saying that GSC would get its eggs by purchasing them from clinics spaying female cats and dogs, thus sparing healthy animals the burden of unnecessary surgery. The A&M researchers got most of their cat eggs from such clinics, but when it came to canines, the same approach “never worked out well,” Westhusin says. “We never could figure out how to actually collect ovaries from a spay clinic and get these to mature in vitro to the point that they could be used for nuclear transfer.”

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Universities and other scientific institutions are required to set up their own Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees to review research proposals and ensure that they meet the act’s standards. Institutions that receive federal funds for animal research are also required to comply with additional welfare protocols, including those set out by the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research in its
Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals
, as well as the American Veterinary Medical Association’s guidelines on euthanasia.

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One small piece of evidence for improvements in efficiency came in 2011, when news broke that Dolly had been cloned again. Four genetic copies of the infamous sheep are alive and well in Scotland. While it required twenty-nine cloned embryos to create Dolly, each of these four new clones required just five embryos.

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Despite the furor over cloned meat, actual
clones
—which cost a lot to produce and are stuffed with great genes—are unlikely to become hamburger. They’re simply too valuable to their owners to be slaughtered. And although the FDA concluded that meat from clones is unlikely to pose any elevated food-consumption risks, the USDA has issued a voluntary moratorium, asking owners of cloned livestock to keep the animals out of the food supply. Instead, cloned cows will be used primarily as breeding stock, and their offspring, conceived in the normal way, will end up on our dinner plates. In fact, since the FDA does not require milk or meat from the offspring of clones to bear any special labels, such products may already be in grocery stores.

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One of ViaGen’s financial backers? Our good friend John Sperling.

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A 2011 Gallup poll shows that respondents between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are more likely than their elders to view cloning as morally acceptable, a trend that may drive further acceptance.

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RNL Bio also has plans to expand—a recent press release made cryptic reference to a planned “theme park for cloned dogs.” I assume this involves creating a place where we can interact with cloned canines, but I prefer to imagine a carnival where the duplicated dogs themselves can unwind, riding Ferris wheels and chowing down on funnel cakes.

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I would later discover that there is, indeed, a clouded leopard hidden in these woods, though it’s tucked away safely inside a cage.

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Animals created through nuclear transfer, you may recall, aren’t quite perfect replicas of their DNA donors, because they contain the mitochondrial DNA from their egg donors. And so, using interspecies nuclear transfer to duplicate an endangered species raises an interesting philosophical question. As the Rutgers University biologist David Ehrenfeld put it in a 2006 essay, “[I]s a cloned animal, whose mitochondrial DNA is at least partly from the egg donor species, a true copy of the species we are trying to conserve; and does it matter if it is…?” It’s a provocative question, but in the long run, scientists could keep the foreign DNA from spreading through a wild population with a little careful breeding. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited entirely from the mother, all researchers would have to do is prevent the female offspring of female clones from having kittens. Male offspring of female clones, and all offspring of male clones, could reproduce freely.

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One dream is to resurrect Lonesome George, the famous Galapagos tortoise who died in 2012. George was the planet’s last Pinta giant tortoise, and after his sudden death, scientists hustled to preserve some of his cells. The president of Ecuador said he hopes researchers will clone George, but before that becomes possible, scientists will need to learn much more about the reproductive biology of tortoises, as well as figure out how to clone reptiles.

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Ehrenfeld did endorse frozen zoos, writing that DNA banking “entails low risk, and seems worthwhile insurance against future discoveries and needs that we can-not know at this time.”

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Among other things, the tracking data led the Craigheads to conclude that the park would be well advised to gradually phase out its open-pit garbage dumps, which attracted hungry bears.

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TOPP was one of seventeen projects launched in 2000 as part of the Census of Marine Life, a massive ten-year global collaboration among 2,700 scientists in more than eighty different countries. The goal was to document the variety of life-forms that live in the world’s oceans, from plankton to mako sharks, in habitats ranging from coral reefs to deepwater vents.

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The TOPP team, for instance, affixed satellite tags—each about the size of a deck of cards and equipped with a short antenna—to the dorsal fins of mako and blue sharks. Thereafter, whenever the toothy predator’s fin slices through the surface of the water, the antenna is exposed and begins transmitting information to a network of satellites. The satellites triangulate the signal, determine the shark’s approximate location, and send this information off to scientists. When the shark slips back below the surface, the apparatus switches off.

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The transmission of an animal’s movements in real time—through the radio collars on bears or the satellite transmitters on sharks—is generally referred to as biotelemetry. The use of instruments that store data, rather than transmit it instantaneously, is known as biologging.

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A review of the 2007 fishing season suggests that the map predicted turtle locations reasonably well. Eight of the twelve loggerhead interactions that year happened when fishermen ignored the map and set their lines in the high-risk zone.

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Tuna aren’t the only commercially harvested species that could benefit from long-term tracking studies. As of 2010, 28 percent of marine fish populations were overexploited, and another 53 percent were being harvested at their maximum sustainable rate. Tags might help us discover better ways to manage these species, too.