Frivolous Use of Science

If you clone your pet, you will be contributing to the science that has brought you such frivolous endeavors as this latest abomination: dogs that glow under ultraviolet light. Ruppy is a puppy that looks like any other in normal light, but glows red under ultraviolet light. Although the scientists responsible for creating this clone claim that this is an important advancement for the study of human diseases, this is not the case. Instead of leading to major breakthroughs in curing human diseases and defects, research done through animal cloning has led to frivolous science.

With Ruppy, scientists have proven that transgenic cloning is possible. The supposed benefit of this experiment is that dogs will eventually be cloned with human genes to study and prevent human diseases, but experts do not agree with this theory. Greg Barsh, a geneticist at Stanford University says, “I do not know of specific situations where the ability to produce transgenic dogs represents an immediate experimental opportunity.” Furthermore, Nathan Sutter, a geneticist at Cornell University adds that “transgenesis is laborious, expensive and slow.” Clearly, then, infecting clone dogs with human diseases is not an effective method of studying human diseases.

In addition to this experiment proving to be a frivolous use of science, it brings up questions about the treatment of cloned animals. If dogs are cloned to be disease models, then scientists will intentionally infect them with human diseases. As the USDA does not regulate the treatment of animals used in animal cloning, these experiments will go on with largely unreported conditions.

Animal cloning companies will continue to tell you that to clone your pet is to contribute to worthwhile projects that will benefit humans. These companies are interested in animal cloning only for commercial purposes and use science frivolously. Their methods are not regulated by the USDA, and experts do not agree that they are contributing valuable information to the field.