Case of the hero pig

I found this article, from the Telegraph UK, on a pig that has been cloned in china, because it survived the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province China. Click on the link to see the story Hero Pig Cloned.

But this is no ordinary pig. He survived for over a month, buried under rubble, eating charcoal and drinking rainwater. He now has six clones of himself, and interestingly, the report says they all "bear a striking resemblance" to him. That makes sense to me! If they are clones, they are the exact genetic copy of him, so uh would look exactly the same! 

We've come a long way in the cloning debate in the last 15 years haven't we? When Dolly the sheep was cloned,  controversy abounded. It seemed that it was only a matter of time before human clones were born.Now we seem to be cloning animals quite frequently and the reaction is very different. People can clone their pets, their pig. Mice, Bantengs and monkeys have been cloned in the name of science. The public (or media) at least seems to have created a link between the cloning of animals and therapeutic cloning, rather than here comes the human clones. I think this is because scientists have become better at communicating the reasons why they are cloning animals. Scientists such as Ian Wilmut (who cloned Dolly) and Robert Lanza (yesterday's blog), have seemed to perfect a balance between animal cloning technology and therapeutic cloning (regardless of what their intentions may be). 

So I'm not sure where the cloners of the Hero Pig should stand? Actually I'm not even sure that the report is true, but the story itself shows us how far we have come.

Next time I am going to show another example of the parallels between animal and human reproductive cloning.