Doggone It: South Korean team beats U.S. in cloning race

August 6, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

Here’s a little tidbit of recent news you might have missed: A South Korean team announced Aug. 3 that is has, for the first time, cloned a dog.

Animal clones are nothing new, of course. Sheep, cats, mice, rabbits, goats, pigs and other creatures have been cloned since 1996. For various reasons, dogs proved harder to clone. An American team has been working on the problem since 1997. They lost out when the South Koreans unveiled two clones made from an Afghan hound. (One died shortly after birth.)

So what does this have to do with anything? Only this: Like it or not, this type of science is going to dominate our lives in the future. Biotech is the next big wave. Those countries that make science a priority will benefit; the others will be left behind.

Where does that leave the United States, where 45 percent of the population denies human evolution and even the president backs “intelligent design”? My guess is it leaves us down the road, eating the South Koreans’ dust.

In case you’re wondering, cloning dogs does have an application beyond some rich guy being able to replace Fido. As Fortune magazine reported:

The ability to clone dogs…opens the door for new kinds of studies on their genes; dogs’ metabolic resemblance to humans should make such knowledge highly valuable to medical researchers. For instance, scientists might disable a particular gene in a cloned dog embryo and then observe the effects of the change on fetal development and on postnatal functioning in order to determine what the gene does. Similar DNA tweaking might produce cloned dogs that are genetically predisposed to illnesses such as diabetes, cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. That would give researchers insight into how such scourges unfold, as well as new avenues to test experimental therapies for them.”

I’ve heard a thousand times the story of how it took the Soviet launch of “Sputnik” in 1957 to make Americans realize that we had fallen behind in science. Science education received a big boost, so the story goes, but we failed to stay the course.

I have to wonder if it’s true. How long did this golden age of science in the schools last? Did it affect all schools or just some? Why did it fall apart?

And fall apart it did. Today, many public school science teachers are afraid to even mention evolution. Textbooks give the underlying principle of modern biology scant treatment. Fundamentalist Christians open “museums” claiming that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, and many people think it’s plausible.

We will pay a price for our ignorance. Backward fundamentalists can temporarily halt the march of science, but they can’t stop it completely. If Americans don’t care to understand modern biology, someone else will. In South Korea, the cloned dog, named “Snuppy” by researchers, stands ready to bite us right in our big old behinds. Maybe it’s just what we need.

I was, inadvertently, part of that big post-Sputnik push back in the 1957. That was the year I started college (USF); Sputnik went up one week into my three-year stint as a chemistry major.

They did push what Americans call science back then, but Americans have a peculiar notion of science. When you say “science” to most Americans they think of going to the moon or curing a disease (“rocket science” and ‘brain surgery”). Those are really more engineering than science, an application of techniques to achieve a goal, rather than fundamental questioning about the nature of the world. Science is Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton … a world quite different from Edison’s laboratories or NASA’s launchpads. Newton (1660 A.D.) could calculcate what it would take to go the moon, and the scholars at the Alexandrian library in 150 B.C. had already calculated the Moon’s size, distance from Earth, circumference of Earth, etc.. The rest of it is fancy plumbing. Brain surgery isn’t so much science as artful butchery.

During my third year they were pushing us all to go right to work after college or push ourselves through a rapid PhD program. To encourage us they had us tour a number of chemical plants in the East Bay during our junior year. I remember interviewing a chemist at Shell Oil. He spent his days radiating petroleum samples using a huge Van De Graf generator. I asked him where I could read about his work. He looked horrified. “Oh, I can’t publish any of this. It’s the property of Shell Oil.”

I was really stunned. It dawned on me that none of these guys was “doing science” as I had learned to think of it – continuation into adulthood of a curious child’s toying with things to see how they might work. They were paid stooges for corporations, like everyone else. That same year I earned a little side money working for a research institute in SF. We were subjecting rats to cigarette smoke to study correlates of cancer. I learned that it was all paid for by the American Tobacco Company. I didn’t think the company was interested in “truth”, and I learned, much later, they did all they could to cover it up.

I’m not sure which is worse, corporate control of what passes for science or fundamentalists’ outright fear of it. At any rate, science at practiced here lost my interest pretty thoroughly. It’s partly what got me into Demography – no one had yet figured out how to “own” that work (except the insurance companies, of course, and even they knew the difference between what they do (make money off demographic information) and what the Census Bureau does (or used to do before Bush got hold of it).

I’m still amazed that when someone wins the Nobel prize (not in itself the be-all and end-all of science, btw) the first thing the TV interviewer says is something like “Now, without going into all that mathematical mumbo-jumbo, tell the average Joe what you’ve achieved.” If it weren’t so sad it would truly be laughable.

  • This is a country in which the only “intellectual” event or
    competition that gets on the evening national news is
    the National Spelling Bee.

    Does that not say it all about this dumbed-down
    American culture of ours?

    And after the evangelicals get done with us
    I can see this on one of those quiz shows:

    Q) What is the theory of evolution?

    A) It’s something like Intelligent Design, but
    without the God in it.

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