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China's New Arrivals: Cloned Mini-Pigs |
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Friday, 01 June 2007 |
Source: CBN
They might look like other pigs, but the two mini-piglets birthed in the lab of China Agricultural University last week won't be reincarnated as bacon or pork chops any time soon.
Instead, they might become organ donors for human beings.
While it seems like a futuristic parallel universe, but China has officially cloned its first mini-pigs that will be used for medical research. Medical researcher Dai Yuping told Interfax China that this birth was a medical breakthrough for China, because two of the six mini-pigs from the litter have survived.
These pigs are hardly the first cloned for medical purposes. In 2000, the same scientists who gave us Dolly the Sheep cloned 5 piglets, and today there are hundreds of cloned mammals across the world, including horses, mice, cats, dogs, sheep, and cows.
Because mini-pigs are roughly the same size as humans with 90% similar DNA, pigs offer scientific hope for successful human organ transplants. Some scientists maintain that cloning these animals and their organs for therapeutic purposes might provide solutions to curing numerous diseases.
Of course, with this scientific knowledge comes ethical responsibility, and the topic of cloning is hardly without controversy.
Cloning laws vary from country to country and every city to city, but the majority prevent reproductive human cloning, which results in cloned human beings.
Some nations including China, the U.K., South Korea, Japan, and Sweden, permit therapeutic cloning of humans, in which stem cells or specific organs are cloned for medical research.
The U.S. and many Catholic countries have stricter regulations, but even within the U.S. different states often have very different laws, if any at all. Furthermore, despite the fact that technology's quickly changing, it's possible that we'll soon have to create a new legal infrastructure to handle biotechnology that doesn't exist yet.
While these pigs might represent scientific progress within China, even more remarkable than the story is the fact that their arrival received very little media coverage in English-language publications. Who would have thought 15 years ago that the birth of cloned pigs would be somewhat of a non-event worldwide?
In Newsweek, Lee Silver has written a fascinating article on some of the current trends in biotechnology, including the potential to artificially create artificial forms of DNA. So instead of cloning a pig, we could create artificial life forms by reconstructing DNA.
The constant technological changes never cease to amaze me, but I hope that the scientific pursuits of new creations do not ultimately cheapen the lives they hope to improve.
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