Tag: Sheep

Dolly to Go on Display

Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, will go on display at the Royal Edinburgh this month as part of an exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and return again in September as part of a permanent display at the museum.

Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 and euthanized 6 years later after it was discovered that she suffered from a progressive lung disease. National Museums of Scotland director Dr. Gordon Rintoul told the BBC,

Dolly is a striking reminder of Scotland’s record of scientific achievement and her contribution can now be recognized for many centuries to come.

. . .

She will prove an important focus for future new science displays in the Royal Museum.

Dr. Ian Wilmot, who lead the team that cloned Dolly, said,

She will go on reminding people of the fact that scientific progress was made in Edinburgh which is making people think very differently about this aspect of biology.

It’s stimulating people to do research which one day will help to provide cells needed to treat very unpleasant human diseases.

Source:

Dolly goes on display. The BBC, April 9, 2003.

Researchers Offer Proof of Prion Infection, Possible Treatment Approach for Mad Cow Disease

Swedish researchers recently offered the most conclusive evidence to date that diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob, scrapie and BSE are caused when abnormally shaped prions attach themselves to normal prions and cause the normal prions to become misshapen as well.

Although this is the method by which such diseases were believed to develop, this process had never actually be observed in animals. Researcher at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland set out to demonstrate this process in mice.

First, they created a genetically modified strain of mice that expressed an artificial prion that was easily distinguishable from other tissues (distinguishing prions from other tissue is otherwise a very difficult task).

Then, they exposed the mice to prion proteins responsible for scrapie in sheep. As they expected, the diseases prions attached themselves to the artificial prions in the mice.

But here’s the real kicker — the diseased prions took much longer to transform the artificial prions into diseased prions. The genetically modified mice survived almost three months longer than a non-modified control group when exposed to the scrapie prions.

Current research into treating CJD and others such diseases is focused on antibodies to create an immune response to the misshapen prions, but this finding suggests that another area to investigate will be the possibility of altering normal prions so they resist the efforts of the diseased prions.

Source:

Study Hints at Way to Treat ‘Mad Cow,’ Related Ills. Reuters, April 3, 2003.

Prion principle proved. Helen Pearson, Nature, April 4, 2003.

Farm Sanctuary Shelter Manager Sentenced for Lamb Theft

In March, the Gannett News Service reported that Farm Sanctuary shelter manager Susan Coston was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and ordered to pay $200 in restitution for stealing a black lamb from a New York farm. She was also ordered to write a letter of apology to the lamb’s owner.

According to Gannett, Coston originally received a call claiming there was an injured lamb on a farm in the Town of Tyrone on November 22, 2002. She went to the farm, but no one was home. So she took the injured lamb and took it to a veterinary hospital where the animal was eventually euthanized.

Police arrested her later that day and charged her with third-degree burglary for stealing the lamb, but that charge was later reduced to misdemeanor criminal trespass.

Source:

Lamb thief gets community service. Jennifer Kingsley, Gannett News Service, March 18, 2003.

U.S. Researchers Clone Calf From Cells of Dead Cow

Researchers at the University of Georgia announced this week that they had successfully cloned a calf from the cells of a cow that had been dead for 48 hours before her genetic material was extracted.

This is the first time a cow has been cloned from cells of a dead animals. European researchers last year announced they had cloned a sheep from cells taken from an animal that had been dead 18 to 24 hours.

The researchers claim that this will allow cattle producers to select the best beef stock from their herds to clone (since it is impossible to judge how suitable a given cow is for meat until after it has been killed).

Further down the road, this technique could allow for the cloning of cows from meat that is tested for low susceptibility to diseases such as Mad Cow.

Source:

Scientists Clone Calf from Dead Cow. Erin McClam, Associated Press, April 25, 2002.

It Doesn't Work Perfectly Yet, So Lets Ban Cloning

Dolly, the cloned sheep, has arthritis. This is apparently big news.

It is big news, of course, because of fears that the arthritis might have something to do with the cloning process. We’ve already learned that many cloned animals have serious health problems, so perhaps Dolly’s predicament might be due to being a cloned animal. Or it could be that Dolly simply is one of a small number of sheep who suffer from arthritis young.

As researcher Ian Wilmut told BBC Radio 4, “There is no way of knowing if this is down to cloning or whether it is a coincidence. We will never know the answer to that question.”

Wilmut has called for an independent study to examine the health of cloned animals. Animal rights activist, of course, have a different response — ban animal cloning.

Sarah Kite of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection told the BBC,

Scientists seem to think that they can mix and match animals’ genes in a controlled way, but actually the control is an illusion. No one yet understands exactly how genes work or what the effects will be on the innocent animals who are subjected to biotechnology.

By all means, since scientists don’t understand exactly how genes work, it seems obvious that the only logical conclusion is that research into how genes work should be banned. How did everyone in the scientific community miss the sort of simple logic that BUAV grasps so easily?

Joyce D’Silva of Compassion in World Farming chimes in as well, telling the BBC,

I think the hundreds and hundreds of other cloned lambs who have been born and had malformed hearts, lungs or kidneys. They have struggled to survive for a few days and then had their lungs filled with fluid and gasped their way to death or had to be put out of their misery by their creators. That is the real story of cloning.

Note, however, that Compassion in World Farming is on the record as being opposed to animal cloning even if researchers figure out how to avoid the problems seen with some cloned animals. The group’s web site says of cloning,

Even if cloning becomes more efficient, CIWF believes it is likely to be a welfare disaster for farm animals. Selective breeding has had a bad record for welfare. Herds of identical cloned animals would lead to even greater loss of genetic diversity with unforeseeable results in terms of illness for the animals. Transgenic pigs used for xenotransplants would have to live their lives in unnatural, sterile conditions. CIWF believes that the suffering involved in cloning and genetically engineering cannot be justified by the benefits claimed by the scientists and multinational biotechnology companies.

In other words, even if researchers succeed in creating a cloned pig whose heart can be successfully transplanted into a human being suffering from heart disease, “the suffering involved … cannot be justified by the benefits.”

Source:

Dolly’s arthrities sparks cloning row. The BBC, January 4, 2002.

Genetic Engineering Campaign. Compassion in World Farming, Factsheet, June 28, 2001

Cloning pioneers consider creating sheep with cystic fibrosis

The team that created a firestorm
of controversy after successfully cloning Dolly the sheep is considering
helping a group of researchers at Edinburgh create a genetically engineered
sheep that has human cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic
disease caused when a child receives a specific faulty gene from both
parents. Cystic fibrosis causes a variety of health problems, which tend
to vary from individual to individual, but is marked by severe respiratory
problems. People with cystic fibrosis have mucus secretions that are much
thicker and stickier than normal human mucus secretions, and the thick
secretions can cause severe respiratory problems from difficulty breathing
to higher risk of infection. A lot of advances have been made in extending
the life span of people with cystic fibrosis, but even today only 50%
of those with the disease will survive into their 30s (many of those patients
have to take up to 40 pills a day to prolong their lives).

Scientists have already managed
to create smaller animals, such as mice and rats, with cystic fibrosis,
but nobody has attempted to do so with larger animals. Sheep are a particularly
good candidate for cystic fibrosis research because they have lungs similar
to human lungs, and they tend to suffer from similar respiratory ailments.
The research under consideration would create at least two sheep with
the defective gene and then require breeding those sheep to produce a
sheep with a copy of the defective gene from each parent.

The Edinburgh researchers already
have a gene therapy treatment for cystic fibrosis that has received approval
in Great Britain for testing in normal sheep, and if those experiments
are successful an experiment in sheep that have the human disease would
be the next logical step.

References:

Dolly
team to create sheep with cystic fibrosis. The Times (UK), February
8, 2000.

What is cystic
fibrosis?. Michigan State University fact sheet.