Scientists Say They’ve Cloned a Horse

Wednesday, August 6th, 2003

From Scientists Say They’ve Cloned a Horse:

Scientists in Italy say they have created the world’s first cloned horse, raising the possibility of a sequel to the next Seabiscuit or a carbon copy of Kentucky Derby champion Funny Cide.

The small, sturdy work horse is now two months old, weighs about 220 pounds and is in excellent health, said its creators. Their announcement beats a Texas A&M team awaiting the birth of its own horse clone.

The cloned Haflinger horse is named Prometea after Prometheus, the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.

In a twist for the growing barnyard of cloned animals, the Haflinger mare that gave birth to the Promotea was also the source of her DNA, meaning she and her foal are identical twins.

Promotea isn’t the only recently cloned equine though:

Prometea was born just two weeks after the first member of the equine family — a mule — was cloned at the University of Idaho. Researchers there have since produced two more cloned mules, which are a hybrid of a donkey and a horse.

Scientific differences in the two cloning projects are striking.

The mules were cloned from cells extracted from developing mule fetuses. But Prometea’s DNA came from her adult mother’s skin cells. Cloning adult DNA has proven more difficult than copying fetal DNA.

There were other differences. The Idaho team harvested fertile eggs, one at a time, from mares. They then removed the nucleus of each egg and inserted DNA from cells of a mule fetus. Those reconstructed eggs were surgically implanted into the wombs of female horses.

Galli’s team, however, harvested hundreds of eggs from mare carcasses at a slaughterhouse. They cultured the eggs, removed their DNA and replaced it with DNA taken from either adult male or female horse skin cells.

Out of a total of 841 reconstructed embryos, only 22 developed to advanced embryos within about a week. Seventeen of those were introduced into nine mares, resulting in four pregnancies, but only one, Prometea, developed to full term.

It was delivered naturally and unassisted on May 28.

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Capturing the Jacobsons

Wednesday, August 6th, 2003

Elizabeth Einstein reviews Mark Jacobson’s Capturing the Jacobsons, a (nonfiction) book with a fascinating premise:

Having reveled in the unusual (smoking a joint with Bob Marley, for instance, or going for midnight sails with caviar poachers in the Caspian Sea, or driving 32 hours to see the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala) on behalf of magazines like Esquire, Outside and Rolling Stone, Jacobson never went in for typical summer holidays. He and his wife, Nancy, had always avoided theme-park vacations, preferring instead to drive through the bayous and Cajun prairies of southern Louisiana or dig for fossils in the South Dakota Badlands. But their kids seemed stuck in a cultural wasteland. So in the summer of 2000, only something truly foreign would do: Thailand, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Egypt, Jordan and Israel and the rickety planes, trains, rental cars and rickshaws that got them there.

This should knock the kids out of their “idiot culture” stupor:

It only takes 23 hours or so on a plane to rip the family from its moorings. The book’s first stop is the funeral pyres of Varanasi, where even seen-it-all Jacobson is disturbed by the sight of dismembered corpses floating down the Ganges. Torn between his bohemian dedication to the value of experience above all else and the sight of his 9-year-old coming face-to-decaying-face with a rotting body, he decides to shield his children: “In search of The Real,” he writes, “it was important to screen out the Too Real.”

There’s more second-guessing at places like Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where a mere 25 years ago the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of fellow Cambodians whose skulls now line its walls.

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Sword of Honour

Wednesday, August 6th, 2003

Paul Robinson opens Sword of Honour by describing an amusing scientific study:

If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one “asshole”. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems. America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason–Dixon line, and the crucial difference now, as at the time of the American Civil War, is honour.

Without the South, we wouldn’t have much of a military.

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Marie Curie: In the Laboratory and on the Battlefield

Wednesday, August 6th, 2003

In Marie Curie: In the Laboratory and on the Battlefield, Lawrence Badash gives a fascinating summary of x-ray history with a few darkly comical tidbits:

X-ray instruments were widely marketed. A person could place his hand in an x-ray beam before a luminescent screen and view his own bones through a hooded visor. Thomas Edison, among others, offered this precarious experience as a diversion at amusement parks.
[...]
The element uranium, discovered by Martin Klaproth in 1789 and named after the planet discovered just eight years before (the first planet not known in antiquity) did not seem especially interesting. Its principal use was to give glass or pottery a greenish-yellow tint. Because of uranium’s great density, attempts were made to incorporate it into military armor.
[...]
The same crystals that Röntgen had illuminated with x rays could also be made to glow by radioactivity. Tiny amounts of radium and those crystals, mixed in paint, could make the paint glow in the dark. This luminous paint was applied to watch dials, light switches, and even to the costumes of nightclub dancers. The patrons could also drink luminous cocktails.
[...]
The variety of radioactive medical nostrums seemed endless: pastes, plasters, muds, inhalers, drinking water, and so forth. That few people were injured by this exposure to radioactivity suggests the weakness of the products. The danger was not widely revealed until the 1920s, when some radium watch-dial painters in New Jersey died after “pointing” their brushes on their tongues and ingesting toxic amounts of radioactive paint. But the danger was already known in smaller circles around 1900, when Becquerel received a burn on his waist after carrying a tube of radium in his vest pocket, and Pierre Curie deliberately gave himself a similar burn. Some physicians were alerted by such evidence to radium’s clinical potential in dermatology.
[...]
The x-ray teams were aware, to some extent, of the danger to themselves from radiation exposure, particularly from fluoroscopy. They wore lead aprons and gloves to avoid dermatitis.

One of the chief points of the article is that Marie Curie promoted x-ray diagnosis (on a large scale) in military hospitals during the Great War. How many of these earlier wars do you remember from high-school history class?

Military surgeons were enthusiastic about the “Röntgen-ray apparatus,” and sets were used in military hospitals during Italy’s Abyssinian War (1896), the Greco-Turkish War (1897), the British campaigns at Tyrah and the Khyber Pass (1897) and in the Sudan (1898), aboard a US ship in the Spanish-American War (1898), in the Boer War (1899), the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the Balkan War (1912-13), and in probably every other conflict of that era in which at least one combatant was technologically advanced.

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The Devil’s Disciples

Tuesday, August 5th, 2003

Talk of the Devil by Riccardo OrizioIn The Devil’s Disciples, Louis Menand asks why people follow dictators:

Few puzzles in political philosophy are more daunting than the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen is a subset of the more familiar Problem of Authority. Why does authority command obedience?

The following examples figure prominently in Cialidini’s Influence (a fascinating read I breezed through last Christmas):

A man who tells you to pick your gum wrapper up off the sidewalk is generally ignored; a man in a uniform who makes the same request, even if it’s the uniform of a bus driver, is instinctively obeyed. People wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards, with no other evidence of expertise, have succeeded in persuading subjects in psychology experiments to act in the belief that they are torturing other human beings. In these cases, people can persuade themselves that the authorities they obey are benign — that picking up litter and torturing other human beings in a laboratory are in the interests of civic order and scientific progress.

I love the concept of “Blofeldism” — what an excellent pop-culture reference:

The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen arises when people willingly obey authorities everyone knows to be evil. Why, after the villain has fled in his private submarine, and while the high-tech palace crashes and burns, does the last unincinerated member of the villain’s private militia risk his life to take a shot at James Bond? Loyalty to Blofeld? Loyalty to the principles of Blofeldism? What could that mean?

Here’s an interesting point about persuasion that rings true:

The mysterious part of totalitarianism’s appeal — and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen — is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. [...] Totalitarian rule, Arendt argued, is predicated on the assumption that proving that a thing is true is less effective than acting as though it were true. The Nazis did not invite a discussion of the merits of anti-Semitism; they simply acted out its consequences.

An excellent point about dictators:

The surest path to the top for a would-be dictator is to assure people that their fate is being determined by strangers, by people who are, in some fundamental way, unlike themselves. Several years ago, Riccardo Orizio, an Italian journalist, began to track down former dictators who are now living in disgrace and largely forgotten, and to interview them. The result, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators (Walker; $22), is fascinating.
[...]
Each ex-dictator is mad in his own way, but what almost all of them insist on, in their interviews with Orizio, is that everything they did — the torture, the starvation, the looting of the nation’s wealth, the murder of political opponents — was for the good of their country. The alternatives were chaos, colonization, or slaughter. These men and women were, in their own minds, patriots. They validate John Adams’s old warning that “power always thinks it has a great soul.” The degree of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc Duvalier had put up in Haiti. It read, “I should like to stand before the tribunal of history as the person who irreversibly founded democracy in Haiti.” And it was signed “Jean-Claude Duvalier, president-for-life.”

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