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Global update: First cloned dog a surprising success
Researchers in South Korea have produced the first cloned dog — a frisky Afghan hound puppy — in a scientifically daunting feat eagerly anticipated by scientists and pet owners alike.
Snuppy — short for Seoul National University Puppy — was grown from an embryo containing DNA from the ear of a male hound selected for his gentle and docile nature, said Woo Suk Hwang, one of the lead researchers. The black, white and tan puppy, now 3 months old, was the sole survivor among more than 1,000 cloned embryos that were transferred into surrogate mothers.
Cloning experts were impressed that even one healthy dog was created. Even as teams around the world have cloned mice, rabbits, pigs, cows, cats and one horse, the eccentricities of the canine reproductive system have made it exceptionally difficult to add man’s best friend to that list. Companies that plan to offer dog-cloning services were quick to herald the achievement, published last week in the journal Nature.
“This validates one of the premises of our business,” said Ben Carlson, a spokesman for Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. The Sausalito, California, company is storing DNA samples from several hundred dogs in anticipation of producing clones for customers as early as next year.
The researchers in South Korea emphasized that their goal was not to reproduce beloved pets. Hwang said his group’s primary aim was to develop genetically identical laboratory dogs for the study of animal and human diseases.
“With the promise of using a homogenous population of cloned dogs, maladies such as hypertension, diabetes, breast cancer or genetic disorders like congenital cardiac defect can be studied more efficiently,” said Hwang, whose lab was the first to clone human embryos last year. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
LTTE methods needed?
Known as one of the world’s most ruthless militant outfits, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are now earning a green reputation for enforcing a ban on polythene bags and other non-biodegradable plastics in territories under its control.
Indeed, one of Sri Lanka’s best know environmentalists and pioneer of the country’s solid-waste recycling programme, Ajantha Perera, wishes she had the kind of authority the Tigers enjoy in banning plastic bags across the whole island and tackling a crisis looming up from poor garbage management. “May be it is because there is one authority over there (in the northern part of the country controlled by the LTTE) and no one can dispute it,” Perera told IPS in reference to the Tigers’ unusually successful environment programme.
Perera’s exasperation is understandable. Mountains of garbage are piling up along the roadsides while the country’s 19.5 million citizens seem oblivious to the hazards posed to the environment as well as to public health. Many of the garbage dumps are uncomfortably close to residential areas and, one of the largest, spread across 20 acres, is situated along the main access road to the country’s only international airport at Bloomandhel, north of the capital. — Dawn/The IPS News Service
River tests
Tests on the River Po in Italy have proved an effective way of gauging levels of substance abuse — thanks to the presence of human by-products from cocaine in the water. Researchers found the equivalent of 4kg a day of Colombia’s most famous export being washed into the Adriatic, showing that Italians were consuming far more cocaine than figures had indicated.
Surveys, crime statistics and other estimates suggested that 15,000 young adults in the region of the Po — which flows from the Alps to the Adriatic — admitted to using cocaine, about once a month. But the river data tell another story — that at least 40,000 people now snort, smoke or inject 100mg of the substance every day.
Ettore Zuccato, of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, in Milan, and colleagues stated in the journal Environmental Health, that as cocaine users excrete benzoylecgonine in their urine, and as the by-product has no other source, the sewage water of the cities and the Po itself does give an accurate picture. “We expected our field data on cocaine consumption to give estimates within the range of official estimates, or perhaps lower, but certainly not higher,” they write.
The results suggested that 27 in 1,000 people in the region, aged 15 to 34, took the drug daily. “The large amount of cocaine (at least 1,500kg, or almost one and a half tons) our findings suggest are consumed per year in the River Po basin would amount to about $150m in street value.” — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Top predators
Top predators keep life in order. When wolves were driven away from the region around Banff in Alberta, Canada, other things went with them, such as willow trees, willow warblers and beavers. That is because the elk multiplied, and browsed the young willows.
Beaver lodges began to disappear as the willow supplies wilted, and sparrows chirped where once willow warblers and redstarts warbled.
Twenty years ago, the wolves moved back to Banff National Park. Mark Hebblewhite of the University of Alberta reports in Ecology that elk populations are twice as high in low wolf areas as in regions thick with predators.
Elk are a wolf’s preferred food: studies in Yellowstone Park, where the wolf has formally been reintroduced, suggest that in late winter, a wolf takes about two elk a month, preventing a population explosion and a subsequent food crisis.
The lesson is that big predators don’t just take the lion’s share, they orchestrate a share for everyone else too. Unfortunately the top predators — tigers, lions, great white sharks, swordfish and tuna — are under pressure from human hunters and habitat destruction.
The study confirms a tenet of conservation theory: that the top predators may be relatively few, but they have a disproportionately important role in an ecosystem. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
The year of hurricanes
The year 2005 is set to be one of the worst years on record for hurricanes, scientists say, amid spectacular new evidence about the power of the storms and fears that global warming is intensifying them.
Less than halfway through the six-month tropical storm season, experts are already warning that the brooding western Atlantic may serve up as many as 21 severe storms and hurricanes this year. If so, that would be more than twice the average annual tally since records began in 1851.
“The 2005 hurricane season could rival historically significant years such as 1887, which had 19 named storms; 1933, which had 21; and 1995, which had 19,” says Barry Keim, assistant professor of geography and anthropology at the Louisiana State University.
Since the start of the season on June 1, there have already been eight “named storms” — the terms used for a tropical depression that is named once it develops winds of at least 62 kilometres per hour. When the speed reaches 118kph, the storm is upgraded to the status of a hurricane. —AFP
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