Dr. Hwang has cloned man’s best friend — or his favorite summer-time dish, depending on your point of view.
Exciting times we live in.
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Dr. Hwang does it again
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on August 4, 2005 at 1:16 pm, filed under South Korea. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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22 Comments
If Hwang opened a boshingtang restaurant, he’d never run out of stock. Sorry.
Good lord. I had never even considered any ulterior motives!
Why are we Americans cursed with such a resolutely anti-science president? If Bush had any more intelligence than a cane toad, the fact that Korea was ahead of us in this technology would spur him to action.
Crap. Now my mother-in-law will be cloned. Just damn!
Although I agree Bush does suck on science it’s not like Hwang has done anything new. He used the same shotgun approach used with Dolly. They had to prepare 1,000 embryos just to get lucky and have one survive.
If he has not done anything new, where are the other cloned canines?
congrats to dr hwang. the scientific world is hailing yet another achievement. do i see korea’s first nobel in science? time will tell.
quote from the seething:
‘koreans share genetic closeness with the japanese because of the massive rapes japan unleashed on korea’. krz
That was a joke Nulji.
“The South Korean team transferred 1,095 cloned embryos into 123 surrogate dogs in order to produce three pregnancies, one of which resulted in a miscarriage. Snuppy was delivered by Caesarean section in late April.”
That’s why it hasn’t been done before. That’s a crapload of dogs.
Hmmm…it’s going to be difficult to get a second serving out of Snuppy with those odds.
Snuppy was delivered by Caesarean section in late April.
Snuppy?!
Yesu Echi Crisco, even the name of the cloned dog is a knock-off!
Snuppy was delivered by Caesarean section in late April.And Snuppy’s offspring will be delivered by Little Caesar’s in late 2006.
[just trying to get the good ones before Jay Leno gets a hold of them.]
There’s a three-legged dog that runs around Insadong, he ran past one of my former coworkers and me one day and the guy said, “A dog that good you just don’t eat all at once….”
krz, you joke about rape? perhaps you were ‘joking’ but your choice of joke is telling.
???! ???!
well you gotta give it to ‘em for sheer determination.
the possibility of cloning dogs was known, but no one really wanted to put all that effort into creating one.
this smacks more of SNU’s sensational research than relevant research. as far as i see it, it’s a waste of time and energy (although i’m not sure what human defects might map to canines for research) except for the power of branding SNU’s lab and raising awareness of their scientific doggedness…
KRZ: in some ways you’re right but i spoke to some senior researchers in Johns Hopkins in the US after they cloned human embryos to get their take on it. what he told me was that, indeed, if the shackles were off, the US would be far far ahead and that these discoveries would be happening in US labs. However, he also expressed awe in the techniques developed by the korean scientists and techs.
“If Bush had any more intelligence than a cane toad, the fact that Korea was ahead of us in this technology would spur him to action.”
I’m not a big Bush fan, but I don’t think that’s actually very fair to Bush. I mean, first of all, the vast bulk of relevant cloning technology is patented by American or American companies. Second of all the Korean researchers collaborate with their US counterpart, you cannot hardly call, because SNU scientists cloned Snuppy, that they are “ahead” of cloning technology. I’m no expert, but I think Bush actually doesn’t care one way or another far as non-human cloning is concerned.
It seems pretty clear this is another case of the Korean scientists trumpeting their “world-wide” success to pander to their Korean tax-payer audience for further support of their research. In turn, the US scientists seem to take on an alarmist stance simply to pander to American tax-payer audience to further support their own research. It’s sorta convenient for these scientists to create the illusion that there is some sort of global stem cell research race. But seriously. Who cares? It seems like these SNU scientists probably got their PhD from a US university, received key consultation from US researchers, got funding from US company, used key US cloning technology, and if they should make some key progress, it will be used by a US company again. US is ahead of the world in semiconductor technology, but RAM chips are made in SK or Taiwan. That’s not a point of contention. That’s just comparative advantage. Anyone who worked in a laboratory knows that the person who designs and submits proposals isn’t the same guy who is staying in the lab all day running tests, recording data, making nice excel spreadsheet… In the United States we usually call these people, “international graduate students.” If you took engineering courses in college, you’ve all had math TA’s who could not speak english whether they be Chinese or Indian. Whoever wanted them in your University probably didn’t give a dang about undergraduate education but for some research project. It was bound to happen that sooner or later we start to outsource research.
Bush is standing in the way of science, no two ways about it. It’s not just cloning, it’s anything that poses a threat to the former-cokehead-in-chief’s religious dogma.
After 1,000 tries that failed, scientists get pressured to produce. Sneak a sperm in. Who’s going to know?
Nobody has money or resources to do a nucleotide by nucleotide matching. Almost a perfect crime..till..
Someday in the future(maybe 20 years from now) biologists will find that there is a timer embedded in a cell as telomere and nobody can reverse it. Not even 1,000 tries.
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virtual: you’re very far off base with that comment. my suggestion is that you pick up a copy of The World is Flat by T. Friedman or Three Billion New Capitalists by Clyde Prestowitz to get a better sense of where the US stands these days economically and scientifically. as i wrote above, one of the senior scientists i spoke with in the US said that they’re chomping at the bit to get into the race. they feel like they could have the same success but, at the same time, are awed by the effort being put forward by the SNU team (not to mention the results). And, your characterization of this as some effort for fame and fortune by the researchers is odd, too. Admittedly, I caught a whiff of that watching the press conference (now they’re thinking PR) but (BUT) for the Koreans this is serious business, meaning that they truly believe this is a prime example of an industry that is going to take their country above and beyond into advanced country status. viewing it cynically only masks the fact that, well, the US is already behind.
Since there seems to be some confusion way up above, the dog’s name, Snuppy, comes from “Seoul National University puppy.”
So is it pronounced “snuppy” as in rhymes-with-puppy or sounds-like-Snoopy?
As for the situation in the U.S., just check some articles on New Yorker as of this spring, well I don’t remember exact season. I think it’s around when Mr. Hwang first announced his success on cloning this year.