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> The colt is a clone of a male Przewalski's horse and the first successful cloning of the species, San Diego Zoo officials said in a news release on September
by akiselev 6y ago
> The colt is a clone of a male Przewalski's horse and the first successful cloning of the species, San Diego Zoo officials said in a news release on September 4. It was born August 6 to a domestic surrogate mother.
I just wanted to note how nonchalant this paragraph sounded in the context of the rest of the article. I remember the cloned sheep over a decade ago, but is animal cloning now so common a procedure that we've moved on from "Oh-em-gee, we cloned an animal!" to species bingo?
The DNA may have been perfectly preserved in lab conditions and we've got a sister species to carry the embryo so it's not comparable, but this is the first step to Jurassic park!
- misnome 6y ago> I remember the cloned sheep over a decade ago Slightly out in your “remember a long time ago” - Dolly was born in 1996! Pet cloning apparently started in 2004! So it’s been around long enough to somewhat mature.
- akiselev 6y agoI don't know what's more horrifying - how old that made me feel or that pet cloning is a thing. Marketwatch says it costs something like $50,000. Of course there's been discussions on HN about it! [1][2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723325 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506712
- microcolonel 6y agoThat's cool, I had no idea it'd gotten that inexpensive, I wonder how much cheaper it can get.
- makx 6y agoThanks for sharing those links! This is so f*ed up that that's an industry. If all that money would have gone to preserving the wildlife we do still have left (but are losing rapidly)...
- kace91 6y agoI got confused reading your comment because I didn't expect you to refer to dolly as recent, it's from before I was able to read (and I'm about to enter my thirties). It's funny how time is perceived differently by different people!
- nullsense 6y agoRePet! https://youtu.be/CtoLvF_TlSA https://youtu.be/CtoLvF_TlSA
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bayesian_horse 6y agoAs far as I know, cloning is relatively "routine" now, especially in horses and other live stock, though relatively expensive. The main issue is that most clones don't survive to birth, so you need to repeat expensive procedures a lot of times.
- tialaramex 6y agoThe most difficult trick isn't carrying it. We might plausibly one day achieve that synthetically. For any creatures whose parents stick around the parents provide essential cues for the offspring's behaviour. More complex behaviour is not "batteries included". Baby humans do not bootstrap a full-blown spoken (or signed) language, it's acquired from the other humans in their environment. A baby bird may be able to figure out how to fly but it definitely won't bootstrap all the detailed behaviour for its species if you don't provide parents to show how to be whatever sort of bird it is. In this case we've got both a surrogate that's "close enough" as far as we're concerned, and also extant adult members of the species that Kurt will meet (and hopefully later breed with some of them) to cover anything we have no idea a Przewalski's horse is supposed to know about and wasn't handled by domestic horse behaviour. But a baby dinosaur has nobody to show it how to be whatever sort of dinosaur it is. We could teach it to be what we thought it was supposed to be, but we have no idea if we're right!
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoDoesn't matter in practice if you are really trying to re-create Jurrasic Park. A working dinosaur is already useful for monetisation, even if Hollywood's idea of what dinosaurs should be like does not quite match up to reality.