From cloning Dolly the sheep in a lab to gene editing dogs in a shed: progress? – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Cloning is making news again. Last week saw the 20th anniversary of a University of Edinburgh research teams announcement of the first successful cloning of a mammal from an adult cell Dolly the sheep.

The accomplishment made headlines worldwide for its audacity. The United Kingdom-based TechRadar website has a quick, clear recap:

She was a perfectly normal sheep in every way, except that she was an exact genetic copy of another one. ... Her creation was a biological triumph. Before Dolly, it was believed that animals could only be produced when an egg cell is fertilised by a sperm cell. ...

Dolly was created in a different way a process that biologists call somatic cell nuclear transfer. No sperm is involved instead, you use a body cell from an adult animal that you want to clone, and an egg cell. Remove the nucleus from both, pop the one from the body cell into the now-empty egg cell, and you get a cell that's ready to begin doubling. Zap it with some electricity and it'll start dividing.

The first cat was cloned in 2001 and the first dog in 2005. Now pet cloning is a fairly big business, with plenty of companies making pitches like this one from ViaGen:

A beloved pet is much like a family member. The unique life-enriching bond, the love and companionship a truly special pet provides us a unique sense of comfort and life-enriching fulfillment which is nearly impossible to extend beyond your pets natural lifespan. Until now.

But mammal cloning has had one of its biggest effects on an obscure corner of the sports world. In 2015, Vanity Fair explainedhow Argentine polo champion Adolfo Cambiasos 2007 loss of his beloved Aiken Cura, a white-faced chestnut stallion, led him to team with wealthy Texas entrepreneur Alan Meeker to have cloning revolutionize his sport.

Cambiaso had a veterinarian puncture his horses neck to get a tissue sample in the vague hope of bringing him back somehow.

Now he makes millions of dollars from cloned horses and regularly sees his old Aiken Cura model.

Cambiaso, Vanity Fair reports, is ...

... surprisingly shy. Walking across the Palermo polo field, where hes come to watch his oldest daughter play, he speaks in short spurts, as if he would rather not be talking to a stranger. Staring into the distance, he says, Today, seeing these clones is more normal for me. But seeing Cura alive again after so many years was really strange. Its still strange. Thank goodness I saved his cells.

In December, Cambiaso rode six clones of the same horsein the Palermo polo tournament in Buenos Aires to help his team win one of the sports biggest events. His company Crestview Genetics raises the cloned horses in Argentina and South Carolina and is now producing clones of Storm Cat, a descendant of Secretariat and the great-grandfather of 2015 Triple Crown champion American Pharoah. But they wont be showing up at the Kentucky Derby. Thoroughbred racing bans clones.

Lately, however, advances in the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool and the way the technology has become far cheaper and more available make cloning feel tame and ho-hum to those who follow science blogs. The Singularity Hub website posted a storythis week about David Ishee, a Mississippi man with a GED degree who breeds gene-edited dogs and wants to use CRISPR to improve dogs health. (Because of severe in-breeding, dogs have the most genetic diseasesof any species.) The story said:

Youd think that to tweak the genome of an animal, some serious training and education would be necessary maybe a post-graduate biology degree or several years working in the lab of a large genetics company.

But in a prime example of both the democratization and demonetization of technology, Ishee taught himself to do genetic engineering right in his own backyard shed, using a kit and some DNA he ordered online. ...

That experimentation could just as easily be done by our next-door neighbor as by a government agency [is] an idea that will take some getting used to. As Ishee put it:

When you think about genetic engineering, you think of Ph.D.s in white coats working in multimillion-dollar labs. The idea of a dog breeder in rural Mississippi doing genetic engineering in his shed is insane. But thats how you know youre in the future, right?

Ishees next project editing the genes of dalmatians to limit their susceptibility to a deadly bladder ailment is on hold. In January, the FDA issued a directiveon genetic engineering that included a ban on editing the genomes of animals.

So humanity realizes the stakes at hand, and wont rush into an era in which animal gene-editing inevitably morphs into human gene-editing and designer babies, right?

Well, no. Scientists in China have been editing human genomesfor at least two years, using what The Verge described as non-viable human embryos that were incapable of growing into adults to see if they can edit out genes that are linked to a deadly blood disorder and to add a mutation to genomes to promote resistance to HIV. Last year, the United Kingdom also gave the go-ahead to similar experiments. And two weeks ago, a 21-member committee jointly created by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine recommended the U.S. eventually allow human genetic engineering, but only to prevent babies from being born with diseases or disabilities.

If David Ishee can design dogs in his shed, does anyone really think human baby designing isnteventually going to be an immense phenomenon, with or without the governments blessing? If CRISPR can be used not just to prevent babies from being born with medical problems but to reduce their genetic predisposition to many diseases later in life, many millions of parents would want that for their children. And while the designers are at it, why not also nice teeth, enhanced intelligence and physical strength and a facial-structure gene or two from Beyonc or Jon Hamm available at a future genetic stock market in Hong Kong or Singapore? Or from a future genetic black market in the dark corners of the Internet?

Which brings us back to Cambiaso and his beloved Aiken Cura: Not just attractive people but elite athletes and geniuses may start thinking about having people puncture their necks to get tissue samples or start worrying about criminals taking a slice. Theres gold in them thar genes.

Reedis the Union-Tribunes deputy editorial and opinion editor. Twitter: @chrisreed99. If you have an idea for a topic that lends itself to this kind of treatment, please send it to chris.reed@sduniontribune.com.

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From cloning Dolly the sheep in a lab to gene editing dogs in a shed: progress? - The San Diego Union-Tribune