Park Chen-Kyong, AFP, via Discovery News at on the Discovery Channel reports that a Japanese center which says it has trained a dog to sniff out human cancer cells is cloning the animal in South Korea, a Seoul-based biotechnology company and the dog’s owner said Wednesday.
Your thoughts? Is this good? Is this dangerous? Are the risks worth the potential benefits? Are there important moral issues here? Please post you comments and let us all know what you think.
Cloned fetuses from the black labrador retriever named Marine were last month implanted into a surrogate mother dog, said Ra Jeong-Chan, president of RNL Bio.
“We are going to see the clones around the end of this month,” Ra said.
Marine, who is six and half years old, lost her ability to reproduce when she had her womb removed because of disease.
She is owned by Yuji Satoh, a head trainer at St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Center, located at Shirahama in Chiba prefecture.
Satoh said experts from Seoul National University, which created the world’s first cloned dog in 2005, had taken some skin samples from Marine and brought them back to South Korea for the project.
“We are making clones of Marine. She is touted as having a world top cancer-sniffing ability. By making her clones, we want to promote studies into cancer-sniffing dogs,” Satoh said.
“It’s the world’s first cloning of a cancer-sniffing dog.”
He and the Korean firm, which is coordinating the project, have agreed to produce two clones and train them at Satoh’s center.
I find this completely wrong. The world is FULL of unwanted animals so lets just compound the issue with cloned dogs . This may be the first cancer sniffing dog cloned but its NOT the first dog cloned on an owners whim. A little while back it was pitbull pups.
The animals are going to be used in research, don’t we have ENOUGH animals used for that? Identical twins are NOT 100% identical. Just because the parent dog can and does sniff out cancer whats the guarantee the pups will too? Is the owner of Marine stepping up and taking in ALL the puppies? Pounds and shelters are overflowing with unwanted animals, thousands are killed every day. So sure lets just go ahead and start cloning more, condemning them to a life of being poked and prodded for research, or the possibility of ending up in shelters when their owners no longer want them.
As we continue on the path of cloning we are getting ever closer to a society where there is NO autonomy. Nobody will be able to make their own decisions anymore as we continue to to be desensitized and morally corrupted by those in powerful positions.
Has nobody out there ever seen any of the movies such as Logan’s Run, The island, or I, Robot and not realized how earily close our reality is getting to the premise of those movies?
This really lights me up and disgusts me. Our world can’t take care of who/what we have in it now.