Yeesh, what my own parental units know about Genetics
E-mail my father, the ignorant
The news in the papers about the recent breakthrough in cloning may cause you to rethink your career choice. Did this clown have a clue about cloning, or is it all a giant hoax in order to justify continued research, and, incidentally, a continuing paycheck for the researcher.
So, some guy in Scotland claims to clone a sheep. Big deal. I don’t know if you ever noticed, but - notwithstanding the old joke about how a lonely sheepherder counts his sheep; "1, 2, 3, Hi Honey, 5, 6,…" - ALL SHEEP LOOK ALIKE!! Scottish geneticist, Ian Wilmut, who worked his balls off (apparently you don’t need them in his line of work) producing a cloned sheep may never be believed in the non-scientific community because of the difficulty of discriminating one sheep from another. If you were running to catch a streetcar and your route took you past a pen, wherein resided 100 sheep of the same breed, including Mother sheep, her clone, and 98 other sheep, you would not be able to tell the Mother from clone from the clone’s Aunt Martha, etc. So it’s easy for some fraud to say, "I cloned a sheep, just try to prove otherwise".
Cloning of mammals has serious implications that have being discussed in the media - namely the cloning of human beings. From an ethics standpoint, cloning of humans will be verboten, but it is only in doing so will Science be able to prove to Joe Sixpack that cloning is not some giant hoax. Submitted for your evaluation - a room full of 100 people, including Michael Jackson, H(IS)(ER) clone, and 98 other, very nervous people. That would prove something once and for all to the world… that Dr. Wilmut should have stayed up in the hills with Honey.
*(Note: in order not to screw up this experiment, Diana Ross could not be one of the other 98).