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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Every porker is different, even if it shares the same genes with a litter of siblings. So forget about ordering a copy of your favorite faithful companion.
Jan 9, 2003 | In the early weeks of 2003, apparitions of Raelian-cloned babies have haunted headlines.
But the Raelian cult, whose members believe that the human race is descended from aliens, has failed to offer any proof that it has in fact bred the first human clone.
Until the cult comes up with some proof, nine red pigs in Texas have more to teach us about cloning than all the Raelian press conferences combined.
In an article forthcoming in the scientific journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Greg Archer, a graduate student in the animal science department at Texas A&M University, and Ted Friend, a professor there, detail the results of their behavioral study on the cloned pigs, born in two different litters.
Although all the pigs were cloned from the same fetal pig's cells, studies found that the pigs have distinct personalities, much like any other litter. The finding goes against the sci-fi conceit that cloned droids would not only look alike, but behave like carbon copies of each other.
Ted Friend, Ph.D., an expert in animal behavior, spoke with Salon by phone from his office in College Station, Texas.
What was the purpose of your cloned pig experiment?
It was to look at the variation among cloned animals to see how similar they are to each other from a behavioral standpoint. The issue was: Do they have individual personalities or not? Do they act like little Homer Simpsons?
Homer Simpsons? What do you mean?
I just saw the episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer got himself cloned about 30 million times.
And all the Homers were identical?
Yes, of course, and they all had a craving for jelly doughnuts. That's how they got rid of all the clones that were running over Springfield. They took a bunch of jelly doughnuts and tied them on the bottom of a helicopter and flew out over a cliff, and all the clones ran off the cliff looking for the doughnuts.
[But] most people in biology would suspect that they're not going to be identical at all.
Why?
Environmental influences. When you clone, you're starting off with a very young animal. So, it won't have the experiences that an adult had.
It won't have the formative jelly-doughnut experience?
Right.
Plus, there may be other things going on in the genetics. Scientists working in cloning call this the "epigenetic effect." When some of these genes are expressed, there's a lot of variation.
Even amid clones of the same organism, their genes are going to be expressed differently?
They might be. Right. Everything that we see from these pigs says yes.
