So maybe your animal, who was of course the best animal in the whole goddamn world, died, and you’d do anything to bring them back. You heard about that cloning thing; it was so long ago that Dolly was cloned (1996, but announced 1997) that by now they should be able to clone your best friend with ease. In fact, plenty of dogs and cats and other animals have been cloned around the world. But let’s look at some facts about the pet cloning industry:
1. If your pet has died more than a few days ago, it is too late to save their cells for cloning. For those who are thinking about cloning, more people are opting to do a biopsy on their living pet to preserve the cells in the event of their death, or in the event that cloning becomes more affordable.
2. Prices fluctuate but last I checked it costs about $50,000 to clone a dog and $35,000 to clone a cat, at least.
3. You don’t know if you will get zero, one, five, or more new pets. So you better have space for ten!
The growth of a rat forelimb grown in the lab offers hope that one day amputees may receive fully functional, biological replacement limbs
IT MIGHT look like an amputated rat forelimb, but the photo above is of something much more exciting: the limb has been grown in the lab from living cells. It may go down in history as the first step to creating real, biologically functional limbs for amputees.
“We’re focusing on the forearm and hand to use it as a model system and proof of principle,” says Harald Ott of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who grew the limb. “But the techniques would apply equally to legs, arms and other extremities.”
“This is science fiction coming to life,” says Daniel Weiss at the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington, who works on lung regeneration. “It’s a very exciting development, but the challenge will be to create a functioning limb.”
Mewtwo is a Pokémon that was created by genetic manipulation. However, even though the scientific power of humans created this Pokémon’s body, they failed to endow Mewtwo with a compassionate heart.
Mewtwo is the product of decades of genetic engineering. Years of gene decoding, splicing, and cloning gave birth to the strongest and quite possibly the most tragic pokemon to date. What’s more, there are heavy implications that Mewtwo was not just cloned from Mew, but is part human as well.
DNA is the basic component for all genomes. Within the double stranded helix, every bit of information you can think of is present. What texture of hair, what colors you can see, if you have scales, resistance to certain diseases, and anything else you can’t think of that makes you, you is inside the DNA.
Cloning is relatively easy: genetic engineering, on the other hand, is not. The whole intent behind Mewtwo was to create the strongest pokemon possible. This is IV breeding to the extreme. To do this, scientists would have to decode the entire genome sequence of Mew, to determine what traits they wanted to keep, and what not. Keep the strength. Toss the cute. Funnel and focus the psychic ability. Dump the natural innocence.
Once you’ve managed to sequence the DNA and isolate the pieces you want, the next step is extracting it. This is most commonly done through a process called PCR, Polymerase Chain Reaction. This is an extremely specific process that usually involves 20-30 repeated temperature cycles. Because of this, PCR machines have been invented to automate the temperature of the sample in these cycles.
Essentially, the sample is heated quickly such that the DNA strand splits apart. This allows a specially engineered primer to enter in, and locate the target sequence. Think of the primer like a puzzle piece. It only fits one place in the DNA, where it will gladly connect. The primer, however, is just the starting point. Once it attaches, free nucleotides will come in and attach themselves to the primer, creating an extended exact copy of the desired gene sequence, at which point it will leave and the DNA strand will zip itself back together.
After that, the newly-created copies of the target gene sequences can be inserted into another organism. Or more commonly, embyros. The engineered embryo was implanted into Mew, and on February 6th, Mewtwo was born.
This method has been used to create glow in the dark rabbits, Jurassic Park style chicken egg dinosaurs, or the harsh and powerful Mewtwo.
PiraticOctopus 