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South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday. In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams. A team of scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, the Ministry of Science and Technology said. "It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned," the ministry said in a statement. "The ability to produce cloned cats...

SAN FRANCISCO -Families and friends who share eggnog, lamb curry or beef stew this winter may not know whether the main ingredients came from cloned animals, after the governor vetoed a San Francisco lawmaker’s labeling bill. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is poised to end a voluntary moratorium on the sale of dairy and meat from cloned cattle, goats, pigs and sheep, after it ruled last year that the food is safe for humans. The agency published a health risk assessment in December that noted high death rates among cloned animals and host mothers, partly because of incidents of...

For a number of years now, a great deal of discussion has taken place among scientists and in the popular media about the genetic engineering of children. Will it soon be possible, for prices widely affordable at least to the upper-middle class, to guarantee that children have a high IQ, or excellent athletic ability, or be over 6 feet tall, or have blond hair and blue eyes? Is it right to commodify children in this way, and have parents choosing options as they do with cars? And wouldn’t it be boring to live in a world someday where almost everyone...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Meat and milk from cloned animals may not appear in supermarkets for years despite being deemed by the government as safe to eat. But don't be surprised if "clone-free" labels appear sooner. Ben & Jerry's, for one, wants consumers to know that its ice cream comes from regular cows and not clones. The Ben & Jerry's label already says its farmers don't use bovine growth hormone. "We want to make sure people are confident with what's in our pints," company spokesman Rob Michalak said. "We haven't yet landed on exactly how we want to express that publicly."...

WASHINGTON — Federal scientists have concluded there is no difference between food from cloned animals and food from conventional livestock, setting the stage for the government to declare Thursday that cloned animals are safe for the human food supply. The Food and Drug Administration planned to brief industry groups in advance of an announcement. The agency indicated it would approve cloned livestock in a scientific journal article published online earlier this month. The agency "concludes that meat and milk from clones and their progeny is as safe to eat as corresponding products derived from animals produced using contemporary agricultural practices,"...

Soliciting advice and instructions on what is the best way to backup a PC. I have two computers and two hard drives on each.Yes, I have done a Google, but I would like the advice from Freepers who have helped many of us with out computer questions over the years. Is there a way to make an exact copy of my OS, including programs and all data, and "paste" it onto the other hard drive? I read about backing up data; what about backing up everyting? Apologizing in advance for asking a stupid question. But, the weekend is when I...

Harvard-affiliated researchers said Tuesday they have begun efforts to create stem cells by cloning human embryos, joining the race among a small group of scientists in this controversial pursuit. The work at Children's Hospital Boston, the main pediatric teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, is aimed at eventually creating stem cells for treating blood diseases like sickle-cell anemia, leukemia and other blood disorders. Dr. George Daley, a leading expert in blood diseases, is overseeing the work at the hospital. Daley, an executive committee member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said he had begun experiments but declined to describe the...

Is the cloning of human babies' tissue an insult to god? Posted at: 22:01 A proposal to create babies that are both cloned and genetically altered to prevent serious hereditary disease has been outlined by the leader of the team that created Dolly the sheep, re-igniting the debate on the moral implications of cloning human beings. Ever since news that Dolly had been cloned from an adult cell made headlines around the world, Prof Ian Wilmut has repeatedly said he is "implacably opposed" to cloning a human being. But in his forthcoming book After Dolly, serialised in The Daily Telegraph,...

ANNAPOLIS, March 31, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The state of Maryland has passed legislation making $15 million available to scientists doing stem cell research, including that using embryos. The bill passed the House of Delegates yesterday, and has received a pledge from Republican Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to sign it.  Early in March, pro-life legislators fillibustered to try to stop the legislation. Sen. Janet Greenip read from Dr. Jerome Lejeune's book, “A Symphony of the Preborn Child,” in which he lays out the humanity of the embryonic child. Senator Greenip was joined by Senators Philip C. Jimeno and Ed DeGrange,...

Philip K Dick is missing. Not the American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall - he died more than 20 years ago - but a state-of-the-art robot named after the author. The quirky android, which made a major splash at Wired Magazine's NextFest in Chicago in June, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner. "We can't find Phil," said Steve Prilliman of Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, which created the futuristic robot with the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, the Automation and Robotics...

BRITISH scientists are planning to create human-rabbit hybrid embryos to speed up research into the causes of inherited conditions such as motor neurone disease and Parkinson's. The controversial work, which involves placing the nucleus of a human cell inside a rabbit egg, is rejected as immoral by churches and anti-cloning campaigners. One of the key ethical problems is whether the hybrid embryo should be treated legally as a human or an animal. Edinburgh University's Professor Ian Wilmut - who created Dolly the Sheep - and colleagues in London believe the hybrids will help them circumvent a shortage of human eggs...

TEHRAN, Iran - In less than two months, Iran hopes to celebrate the birth of cloned sheep, the first such attempt in the Middle East and part of the country's ambitions _ along with its nuclear and space programs _ to become a regional high-tech powerhouse. The cloning program has won backing from Iran's Muslim Shiite religious leaders, who have issued religious decrees authorizing animal cloning but banning human reproductive cloning. A majority of Iran's nearly 70 million people are Shiites. In contrast, Sunni Muslim religious leaders _ including senior clerics in Saudi Arabia _ have banned cloning altogether, even...

A team of South Korean scientists has created genetically altered pig clones, which produce an exorbitantly expensive substance that helps patients fight cancer. The team, led by professor Park Chang-sik at Chungnam National University, Wednesday said they cloned four female piglets that will secrete GM-CSF in their milk in a year. GM-CSF is a protein that stimulates the bone marrow to produce several kinds of white blood cells and prolong their survival outside the bone marrow.

South Korea's pioneering stem cell scientist has cloned a dog, smashing another biological barrier and reigniting a fierce ethical debate — while producing a perky, lovable puppy. The researchers, led by Hwang Woo-suk, insist they cloned an Afghan hound, a resplendent supermodel in a world of mutts, only to help investigate human disease, including the possibility of cloning stem cells for treatment purposes.But others immediately renewed calls for a global ban on human reproductive cloning before the technology moves any farther."Successful cloning of an increasing number of species confirms the general impression that it would be possible to clone any...

Scientists for the first time have cloned a dog. But don't count on a better world populated by identical and resourceful Lassies just yet. That's because the dog duplicated by South Korea's cloning pioneer, Hwang Woo-suk, is an Afghan hound, a resplendent supermodel in a world of mutts, but ranked by dog trainers as the least companionable and most indifferent among the hundreds of canine breeds. The experiment extends the remarkable string of laboratory successes by Hwang, but also reignites a fierce ethical and scientific debate about the rapidly advancing technology. Last year, Hwang's team created the world's first cloned...

TODMORDEN, England (Reuters) - Women having fertility treatment should be given the option to donate for research any extra eggs they do not use, the head of the first European team to clone a human embryo believes. Dr Miodrag Stojkovic, of Newcastle University in northern England, told Reuters one of the greatest obstacles to stem cell research -- which could lead to cures for conditions such as diabetes, cancer and Parkinson's -- was obtaining fresh eggs. "What we are using are eggs which are usually discarded. The development potential is not the same as fresh eggs," said Stojkovic, a stem...

May 4, 2005 Texas Thinks Hard about Stem Cell Research I would not have believed Texas could even consider state funding for embryonic stem cell research until I read this in the Dallas Morning News: One of the most important questions facing legislators in Austin this session is how to treat research that involves embryonic stem cells, which many scientists believe can help cure diseases such as juvenile diabetes and Parkinson's, as well as spinal cord injuries and other debilitating conditions. Such research is in addition to ongoing research using adult stem cells, which are much more limited in supply....

Science and ethics: will they clash violently again? “Watching a living likeness of yourself instantly materialize in front of your own eyes is an emotional mind-altering experience. At first it feels like an eerie dream or a drug induced hallucination as you view this replicate of yourself.”(Hulagu's Web, p. 101) What we can visualize soon becomes reality. Jules Verne is a favorite example of a writer that was able to describe events and things in his fiction, which materialized decades later as events and objects of reality. We can observe the same phenomenon today over and over again in many...

SAN FRANCISCO -- The first cloned-to-order pet sold in the United States is named Little Nicky, an eight-week-old kitten delivered to a Texas woman saddened by the loss of a cat she had owned for 17 years. The kitten cost its owner $50,000 and was cloned from a beloved cat, named Nicky, that died last year. Nicky's owner banked the cat's DNA, which was used to create the clone. "He is identical. His personality is the same," the woman told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. The company, Sausalito-based Genetic Savings and Clone, made her available to speak to...

Fly results might benefit methods for cloning mammals. As if there weren't enough of them in the world already, scientists have succeeded in cloning flies. The identical fruitflies are the first insects ever cloned, says the Canadian team that created them. The question everyone asks, says group leader Vett Lloyd of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is why anyone would want to clone flies in the first place. She hopes that the insects, which are very easy to experiment with, will help to fine-tune the cloning process in other animals and even in humans, where the technique is being...