New Scientist: Fluorescent puppy is world’s first transgenic dog
A cloned beagle named Ruppy—short for Ruby Puppy—is the world’s first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light.
Fluorescent puppies, I ask you. What a totally wasted opportunity. If we’re going to genetically engineer dogs, why not engineer them to do something useful?
Yes, that’s right, I’m on about talking dogs again.
Just imagine: a talking dog.
I found myself in the unusual position of talking with a geneticist the other week, so I decided to seize the opportunity to ask the question on everyone’s lips: how long will it be before we can genetically engineer a talking dog?
Imagine my disillusionment when the geneticist replied to my question along the lines of, “Never. We will never have talking dogs”. Actually, she didn’t reply along those lines at all; those were her exact words: “Never. We will never have talking dogs”.
I think this shows a startling lack of ambition within the geneticist community. If, indeed, geneticists have communities. How are we ever going to engineer talking dogs if they dismiss the very idea as impossible before they’ve even tried? They need to set the bar higher; reach for the stars. We are human beings, and we don’t take impossible for an answer. Splitting the atom was impossible; having a conversation with someone on the other side of the Atlantic was impossible; going to the moon was impossible. But we bloody well did it!
My mum’s dog, an incredibly intelligent young cocker spaniel named Molly, can talk. Well, almost. When I turned up at my parents’ house on Tuesday, I found they had accidentally bolted the door, so I rang the bell:
“WOOF! WOOF! W O O F !” barked Molly, in her scariest, I’m-a-bloody-huge-dog-so-don’t-you-mess-with-me-Mr-Burglar voice.
“Don’t be silly, Molly, it’s Richard!” I heard my mum say as she came to open the door.
“Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip!!” said Molly, in her here-comes-Richard voice.
If any geneticists out there are interested in engineering a talking dog, and would like a sample of Molly’s DNA by way of a major shortcut, please let me know.
Stense snarling to the right.
While I was trying to brush up on my technique in the bathroom mirror the other day, it suddenly dawned on me that I can only do an Elvis snarl on the right-hand side. Or should that be right-lip side? If I try to do an Elvis snarl on the left-lip side, it looks like I’m having a stroke.
I wonder if it’s genetic which side you do an Elvis snarl on.
Interestingly, I am right-handed and Stense is left-handed, but we both snarl to the right. I haven’t asked Stense if she can snarl to the left as well, but I did ask Fitz. It turns out Fitz used to practise his Elvis snarls in the mirror too, and he’s the same as me: right-handed, and can only snarl to the right.
Admit it, you’re testing your own Elvis snarl right now, aren’t you? Fascinating, isn’t it?
Jen, on the other lip, can snarl either way. Jen is also right-handed, but she doesn’t have any earlobes. Whether you have earlobes or not is definitely genetic: I read it in a magazine. None of Jen’s family has earlobes.
Jen, Fitz and I can all curl our tongues, which is also genetic: we can stick out our tongues and curl the sides in to make a tube. Stense, however, cannot curl her tongue to make a tube. She has recessive genes. Here is a photo of Stense wearing her recessive genes. Sorry, I mean jeans—different thing entirely (but still well worth a look).
Jen and Stense are both women. Fitz and I are both men. A person’s sex is pretty much genetically determined. So is their right- or left-handedness.
A study reported in New Scientist this week indicates that musical ability is not genetically determined: it’s all about hard graft and practice, apparently. I wonder if Elvis-snarls are down to hard graft and practice too. I doubt it, because Fitz says he has tried and tried to snarl to the left—and so have I—but Jen could do it straight away without any practice at all. I reckon it must be linked to her earlobes. The ones she hasn’t got, I mean.
Fitz is an extremely talented musician—and so are Stense and her sister—but I couldn’t play a musical instrument to save my life (no matter how hard I practised). Jen used to play the cornet, but I don’t think she had any natural flair for it—not even with her ambidextrous lips. Elvis Presley was a good singer, but only a mediocre guitar-player. I think I saw him playing the bongos once, poorly.
Stense does have earlobes, though.
How about you?
Ooooh! Just what we’ve been waiting for:
BBC: Taiwan breeds green-glowing pigs
Scientists in Taiwan say they have bred three pigs that “glow in the dark”.
They claim that while other researchers have bred partly fluorescent pigs, theirs are the only pigs in the world which are green through and through.
The pigs are transgenic, created by adding genetic material from jellyfish into a normal pig embryo.
For goodness’ sake! How bloody irresponsible can you get? I rely on bacon turning green and starting to glow in the dark to inform me that it’s probably past its best. How am I going to tell now? I do wish these so-called scientists would stop to think before they start meddling with nature.
If they really must mess around with the porcine genome, why don’t they produce something useful for a change, like an even-better-tasting pig (hard to imagine, I know), or one that can mow the lawn or something?
It’s stuff like this that gives science a bad name.
BBC: ‘Four mothers’ for Europe’s Jews
Almost half of Europe’s Jews are descended from just four women, according to a new study.
That’s nothing: the entire human race is descended from just one female. The evolutionists and the creationists can agree on that one—although they don’t quite see eye-to-eye on some of the finer details.
Jailbird Jeff.
The general feeling in Britain seems to be that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Seldom in a single day have I heard the word comeuppance used by so many people. The general dislike for Archer seems to be founded on a number of factors, not least the verifiable facts that he is:
The British press is having a long-awaited, long-prepared-for field day, with more than one of its number pointing out the similarities between the shortfalls of Archer and those of his cheating, philandering father. To its eternal shame, BBC2′s flagship news magazine, Newsnight, began a piece on Archer on the day of the court ruling by observing that he inherited the genes of his cheating father; the clear implication being that his criminal behaviour might somehow be attributed to his genes…
Bollocks! My dad and I both like John Wayne movies. Does this mean that there is some genetic basis to my liking for the The Searchers and True Grit? Isn’t it so much more reasonable to attribute it to the fact that I was brought up in an environment where I could learn to appreciate John Wayne’s movies (because they were on our television all the time)? Similarly, if you are brought up by criminals, isn’t it more likely that you will learn to treat the law with contempt?
I’m not saying that there isn’t a genetic element to criminal activity (although, if there is such an element, I suspect it is likely to be very minor), but the sort of flippant, throw-away remarks made by the likes of Newsnight are irresponsible and dangerous. We are all products of our genes and our upbringing; you cannot separate the two. In the words of one of my favourite novelists, the late, great Canadian, Robertson Davies:
Nature and nurture are inextricable; only scientists and psychologists could think otherwise, and we know all about them, don’t we?