Friday 15 May 2009
Thursday 14 May 2009
Jedburgh Abbey
More behaving like Children in Jedburgh Abbey. They have dressing up facilities and medievel engineering puzles which are actually much harder than they look!
Peel rolling at Linlithgow palace
Sometimes its good to have a day off and behave like children. Over the May day holidays a wee group of us went to Linlithgow Palace for a picnic and to roll down some hills. A word of advise - dont try this when hung over...
Wednesday 22 April 2009
Tuesday 3 February 2009
Interesting point of view...
Cloning our way to survival -Ashish Fernandes
In the first week of the new millennium, a gaur called Noah was born in Iowa in the United States. Not an ordinary gaur, but the product of a cloning operation wherein DNA from the skin cells of a gaur that died in 1993 was fused with cow eggs stripped of their nuclei and then implanted in a surrogate mother, an Angus-Hereford cow.
Noah's birth was greeted with acclaim across the world. The gaur is an endangered species, so there has been much speculation that this development could hold great potential for preventing the extinction of species and even for resurrecting species that have vanished from the face of the earth. The scientists who cloned Noah soon announced that a recently extinct Spanish goat, the bucardo, was next in line and another group is reportedly keen to clone a 20,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth found in Siberia. Within a few days of Noah's birth, an announcement was made that the Indian government was setting up a project to clone the extinct Asiatic cheetah at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, at a cost of Rs. five crores. The possibilities seem endless. With thousands of species hurtling towards extinction, this technology could solve the problem of the earth's vanishing wildlife.
Or so they said. Noah died within 48 hours, apparently of clostridial enteritis, a bacterial infection, probably contracted from his mother. The scientists working on the project insisted that Noah's death had nothing to do with him being a clone.
By some estimates, 137 species are disappearing from the earth each day, which adds up to an astounding 50,000 species every year, about 1,000 times the natural rate of extinction. Given this scenario and the gloom it often inspires, the idea that we can simply recreate species is extremely alluring.
Yet one can't help feeling that this is a short-sighted view. Whether Noah would have survived or not, the argument that cloning offers a way out of the conservation crisis facing the planet leaves one feeling a bit uneasy, and for a variety of reasons.
Cloning is prohibitively expensive at the moment. When most biodiversity areas across the world, especially in the South, are starved of funds for routine protection and maintenance work, surely that money is better used to protect what still remains? The cloning establishment would like the public to believe that this is the solution to the problem of conserving endangered species, but if a fraction of the funds that would be necessary to carry out such programmes on a sufficiently
large scale were devoted immediately to the areas that need them most, cloning species might not be necessary at all! While India's wildlife protection budget is abysmally inadequate, five crores miraculously appeared for the cheetah cloning project!
Of course, there are innumerable other issues as well. Once animals are cloned, what about the reintroduction process? Assuming, of course, that reintroduction into the wild is the end purpose of the cloning game. This will require further inputs in terms of finances and effort. And exactly how feasible the artificial rearing and reintroduction of higher carnivores is, remains anyone's guess, given the overwhelming role that environment and upbringing plays in training young ones to hunt and survive on their own. A tiger cub, for example, learns to stalk its prey by watching its mother, while a chital fawn needs the protection of the herd. Neither will avail of these benefits from a lab assistant, no matter how highly trained.
Implanting cloned embryos in wild surrogate mothers will be infinitely more difficult and prone to complications than using a captive surrogate mother. Added to this is the very real possibility that the entire million-dollar experiment could be unexpectedly eaten by a hungry tiger!
The global community is looking for 'techno-fix' solutions to the ecological problems humanity has brought on itself. "So what if our activities destroy something? We can just create it again!" This ignores the root cause of the problem and attempts to address the symptoms, not the disease itself. Even if we did clone and release a few hundred tigers into the wild, they would continue to have their habitat destroyed by one mega-project or another or be poached for the Chinese medicine trade. Cloning appears so attractive because it seems to be the easy way out to counter extinctions, rather than the tougher option of protecting wild habitats. Convincing politicians and bureaucrats of the need to protect wildlife is hard enough, without having to contend with this argument too.
At best (assuming we leave aside ethical issues), cloning might have a very minor supporting role to play in the much larger effort to protect what is left today, habitats as well as species. So while cloning might be a 'big step' forward in the science of genetics, it is about as far away from true conservation as you can get.
Contact Ashish Fernandes, Assistant Editor of Sanctuary Magazine.
Send your comments on this article to info@sanctuaryasia.com or join our Discussion Board
http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/features/detailfeatures.php?id=533
In the first week of the new millennium, a gaur called Noah was born in Iowa in the United States. Not an ordinary gaur, but the product of a cloning operation wherein DNA from the skin cells of a gaur that died in 1993 was fused with cow eggs stripped of their nuclei and then implanted in a surrogate mother, an Angus-Hereford cow.
Noah's birth was greeted with acclaim across the world. The gaur is an endangered species, so there has been much speculation that this development could hold great potential for preventing the extinction of species and even for resurrecting species that have vanished from the face of the earth. The scientists who cloned Noah soon announced that a recently extinct Spanish goat, the bucardo, was next in line and another group is reportedly keen to clone a 20,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth found in Siberia. Within a few days of Noah's birth, an announcement was made that the Indian government was setting up a project to clone the extinct Asiatic cheetah at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, at a cost of Rs. five crores. The possibilities seem endless. With thousands of species hurtling towards extinction, this technology could solve the problem of the earth's vanishing wildlife.
Or so they said. Noah died within 48 hours, apparently of clostridial enteritis, a bacterial infection, probably contracted from his mother. The scientists working on the project insisted that Noah's death had nothing to do with him being a clone.
By some estimates, 137 species are disappearing from the earth each day, which adds up to an astounding 50,000 species every year, about 1,000 times the natural rate of extinction. Given this scenario and the gloom it often inspires, the idea that we can simply recreate species is extremely alluring.
Yet one can't help feeling that this is a short-sighted view. Whether Noah would have survived or not, the argument that cloning offers a way out of the conservation crisis facing the planet leaves one feeling a bit uneasy, and for a variety of reasons.
Cloning is prohibitively expensive at the moment. When most biodiversity areas across the world, especially in the South, are starved of funds for routine protection and maintenance work, surely that money is better used to protect what still remains? The cloning establishment would like the public to believe that this is the solution to the problem of conserving endangered species, but if a fraction of the funds that would be necessary to carry out such programmes on a sufficiently
large scale were devoted immediately to the areas that need them most, cloning species might not be necessary at all! While India's wildlife protection budget is abysmally inadequate, five crores miraculously appeared for the cheetah cloning project!
Of course, there are innumerable other issues as well. Once animals are cloned, what about the reintroduction process? Assuming, of course, that reintroduction into the wild is the end purpose of the cloning game. This will require further inputs in terms of finances and effort. And exactly how feasible the artificial rearing and reintroduction of higher carnivores is, remains anyone's guess, given the overwhelming role that environment and upbringing plays in training young ones to hunt and survive on their own. A tiger cub, for example, learns to stalk its prey by watching its mother, while a chital fawn needs the protection of the herd. Neither will avail of these benefits from a lab assistant, no matter how highly trained.
Implanting cloned embryos in wild surrogate mothers will be infinitely more difficult and prone to complications than using a captive surrogate mother. Added to this is the very real possibility that the entire million-dollar experiment could be unexpectedly eaten by a hungry tiger!
The global community is looking for 'techno-fix' solutions to the ecological problems humanity has brought on itself. "So what if our activities destroy something? We can just create it again!" This ignores the root cause of the problem and attempts to address the symptoms, not the disease itself. Even if we did clone and release a few hundred tigers into the wild, they would continue to have their habitat destroyed by one mega-project or another or be poached for the Chinese medicine trade. Cloning appears so attractive because it seems to be the easy way out to counter extinctions, rather than the tougher option of protecting wild habitats. Convincing politicians and bureaucrats of the need to protect wildlife is hard enough, without having to contend with this argument too.
At best (assuming we leave aside ethical issues), cloning might have a very minor supporting role to play in the much larger effort to protect what is left today, habitats as well as species. So while cloning might be a 'big step' forward in the science of genetics, it is about as far away from true conservation as you can get.
Contact Ashish Fernandes, Assistant Editor of Sanctuary Magazine.
Send your comments on this article to info@sanctuaryasia.com or join our Discussion Board
http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/
Tuesday 20 January 2009
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