Category Archives: Cloning

Star Wars isnt the only universe with a clone problem. This week, the clones are running wild throughout Hearthstones Tavern Brawl.

This weeks Hearthstone Tavern Brawl is When Clones Attack. If youre a lazy Tavern Brawler, today is your lucky day. All you need to do to play this Brawl is select a class. Once youve chosen your desired class, youll receive a random deck and youre ready to dive into the fray.

During this Tavern Brawl, every minion you play will generate a 1/1 clone. The lore-centric reason behind this within the Brawl is Zerek, Master Cloner. In Hearthstones parent game World of Warcraft, Zerek works for the eccentric Goblin, Dr. Boom. Zerek handles Dr. Booms more scientific projects, including but not limited to cloning.

Since every minion played during this Brawl will generate a 1/1 clone, both sides of the board can fill up fast. And because decks are random, you wont really know which tools you have at your disposal. Youll want to try to maximize the effectiveness of any board clear or direct damage spells you draw throughout the game.

In the meantime, try to make intelligent decisions when it comes to trading minions against your opponent. Dont let them amass a board so big that theyre able to trample you because you chose not to trade for too long.

This Brawl will be up until next Wednesday, Aug. 4. Youll have until then to earn your free Year of the Phoenix card pack.

See the rest here:

When Clones Attack returns as this week's Hearthstone Tavern Brawl - Dot Esports

Scientific breakthrough

Dolly was created by replacing the nucleus in an egg cell from a Scottish Blackface sheep with the nucleus of an adult udder cell from a white-faced Finn Dorset sheep. She was born to a surrogate Blackface ewe.

It was the first time that an adult cell had been used to create a cloned animal.

The research that led to Dolly has supported new understandings of stem cells early stage cells that can develop to form various tissues. Scientists are researching how to control their development, and how mature cells may revert to behave once more as undeveloped cells.

Insights from Dolly have also enabled advances in gene modification and gene editing making beneficial changes to the DNA of an organism, such as a plant or animal.

The researchers who produced Dolly were working on cloning as a method of producing genetically modified livestock for research.

The advance, carried out by a team from Roslin and PPL Therapeutics, was technically difficult. Dolly was the result of many months of research involving a highly skilled team.

Cloning has since been superseded by other technologies and is no longer carried out at the Roslin Institute.

Go here to see the original:

Celebrating Dolly the Sheep's legacy, 25 years on - The Poultry Site

IPS officer Vivek Sahay has now changed his profile picture on Facebook and warned people to not accept any request coming in his name.

Kolkata: Vivek Sahay, director of security in the West Bengal government, on Monday said that his Facebook account was cloned and the hacker was duping people for money.

Sahay made the revelation through a social media post and said he has alerted the Cyber Crime Cell of the Kolkata Police. Someone has cloned my account and has been asking for money from the number below. Please be careful as per advice given by cyber people, he wrote.

Sahay said the cyber experts told him that the cloning of his Facebook account has nothing to do with his password or his profile. This guy (hacker) has created a spoofed messenger box. Such gangs operate mainly from Ghaziabad/Patna. We will work it out. Only request is to alert all people in your friend list. No one should end up paying something, they said.

The IPS officer has now changed his profile picture on Facebook and warned people to not accept any request coming in his name from the social media account with a different profile picture (which does not match with the profile picture of his Facebook account).

Sahay had made headlines in March after the Election Commission suspended him from the post of acting director of security for Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee after lapses that led to Banerjees leg injury in Nandigram on March 10.

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here

Originally posted here:

Facebook Account of Bengal Govts Security Director 'Cloned, Hacker Tries to Extract Money from People - News18

With the release of Horizon 2006, VMware brings new deployment features to its Instant Clone technology. IT teams can use smart provisioning and ClonePrep to create secure, efficient VMs with vCenter, plus they can use VMware's Guest Customization Engine to launch Instant Clones on Linux.

When admins clone a VM, VMware Horizon creates an exact copy, which means the clone consumes the same amount of data as the original VM. Linked Clones were the first efficiency improvements of the VM cloning process. With Linked Clones, a parent VM is the central disk that connects to child VMs, and it only recognizes and stores changes related to the parent VM.

This reduces the necessary disk space, because for each VM, only the unique disk blocks are stored. The creation process is also fast because instead of cloning the entire disk, each VM starts with an almost empty disk.

This process is efficient on disk, but the hypervisor memory still registers each VM as a full VM -- where every machine must be individually booted and customized -- which takes time and resources. Plus, for each parent VM, first a replica is created to link the VM so that admins can update the parent VM independently from any clones.

VMware introduced a new technology with vSphere 6.0 Update 1 that lets admins implement a cloning technology that uses a parent VM that boots and loads in the memory; any child VMs spawn off from the parent VM.

These VMs are Instant Clones and they do go through a boot cycle because the run process is based on the already booted parent VM. For each machine, only the machine's unique memory pages are placed in the hypervisor's memory. On-disk Instant Clones work similarly to Linked Clones in terms of efficiency and resource savings. The image shows the relationships between the parent and child VMs.

VMware added native support for Instant Clones in VMware Horizon version 7. When they were first introduced, they were only available for Enterprise license customers. Other IT teams still relied on Linked Clones for efficient desktop deployments.

However, VMware decided all customers must switch to Instant Clones and now this feature is available to customers starting with Horizon 2006. To give organizations time to switch, Linked Clones are still available in Horizon 2006's initial release but VMware plans to remove them in Q4 2020.

The requirement to create an Instant Clone desktop is to have a Golden VM prepared with the VMware Horizon Agent with the Instant Clone component enabled. That machine then creates a Linked Clone template. Then, a full clone replica is created on each datastore used for the pool and a parent VM is created per host, per datastore.

The following image shows the objects that the vCenter inventory can create.

Instant Clone implementation can cause a sprawl of replica and parent VMs, depending on the design. There is a replica per datastore, and a parent per host, per datastore in an eight-node cluster. If admins configure four data stores for a pool, there would be four replicas and 32 parent VMs.

If an admin runs only 20 virtual desktops, then the overhead outweighs the benefits. In this scenario, it would be best to use a single datastore because it limits the number of parent VMs to eight. But it is not the most efficient approach with the same 20. With Horizon 2006, parent VMs are only created if admins run more than 12 virtual desktops for an Instant Clone pool per host.

If an admin had eight hosts and 20 virtual desktops, then there would be no more machines beyond the 20 desktops themselves. The disadvantage of this is that Instant Clone deployment time takes longer. They behave like older Linked Clones because they do not share parent VM memory.

Because Instant Clones that are spawned off from a parent are a clone of a running process, they don't require the Windows boot process.

It's very efficient but imposes a new problem because the computer name and domain membership must be changed, which normally requires a reboot. Because of this, VMware introduced a new utility called ClonePrep that takes care of the rename and domain join without a Windows boot process.

This function replaces QuickPrep and Sysprep. There is one important difference between these utilities and that is that only Sysprep can change the Security Identifier (SID) for a machine. It is very rare that a unique SID is necessary for all virtual desktops.

In the rare case that an application requires a unique SID, the only other option would be to use full clones.

This ClonePrep for Windows requirement, which is only available with Horizon, is the reason that it's tricky for admins to deploy their own Instant Clones on vSphere.

Any admin can launch their own Instant Clones through the vSphere API, but then the customization process for Windows is unavailable. This makes efforts to create Instant Clones outside of Horizon that are targeted toward non-Windows OSes.

It is only possible to create Instant Clones through the vSphere API, not directly in the vSphere Client. For admins who can use the SDK from a programming language, there is a set of PowerCLI extensions that contain a cmdlet to create an Instant Clone.

Creating an individual Instant Clone is only 50% of the work, the other half is to customize the OS. For Windows, this is done with Horizon's ClonePrep, but outside of Horizon there are only Linux-based tools. VMware offers a Guest Customization Engine for admins that use Linux.

Once installed, this engine configures the network in the guest VM and allows an admin to run their own required scripts for Instant Clone that support an application or need OS customizations.

There are not only options available for Linux. William Lam, a solution architect at VMware, made a solution to create Instant Clones for nested ESXi hosts. When admins use PowerCLI and shell scripts written for this workflow, it's possible to run many nested ESXi servers with a small memory footprint.

Read more:

Dive into the latest features for VMware Instant Clones - TechTarget

Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size

He died of the cold. His name was Benjamin, the thylacine, Ben, the last Tasmanian Tiger only we didnt know that when he was captured and put in a zoo in 1933.

In grainy black-and-white footage, Benjamin paces his enclosure, yawning and baring his jaws. He lies down, he sniffs the concrete. At one point (off-screen) he even gives the cameraman a cheeky bite on the bum.

He died three years later, locked out of his backroom shelter one freezing night, just weeks after his species was at last granted protected status in Tasmania following decades of hunting. Eventually, the world came to realise that Benjamin really was the last of Australias great striped marsupial. But, when he died, they saw only an animal too damaged to be preserved in a museum. His body was tossed in a dumpster.

Benjamin, the last thylacine, in 1933 shortly after he arrived at Hobart Zoo.Credit:The Thylacine Museum/Wiki Commons

Benjamins story now haunts ecologist Euan Ritchie as he maps accelerating extinction rates around the world. What a perfect metaphor, he says. Benjamin died of neglect and then we threw him out. These species took millions of years to evolve and now theyre disappearing by the thousands because we dont care enough. Its like going into a museum and lighting all of its precious paintings on fire.

Paleontologist Michael Archer is also haunted by the story. But he has a plan to make sure Benjamin is not the last thylacine. Archer isnt one of Australias infamous Tasmanian Tiger hunters, the ones who trek into the bush convinced they may yet find a survivor of the extinct species. Though he has diligently DNA-tested suspected thylacine excrement sent in by such spotters, Archer says sightings always turn out to be fascinating bullshit.

Instead, he is part of the de-extinction club: a growing group of scientists working to harness genetic engineering and cloning to reach into the past and resurrect extinct animals. Top of the list are the thylacine and the woolly mammoth. Archer and others say the unnatural pace of climate change and habitat destruction mean bringing back key species may now be the only way to stop ecosystems from collapsing. Harvard Universitys renowned geneticist George Church, himself working to return the mammoth to the Arctic tundra, says reviving some species could even help combat the effects of global warming. But others, such as Ritchie, warn that it might put the wild in jeopardy all over again, or pull vital focus from the urgent work underway to save those species we do have left.

So how does de-extinction work? Would a woolly mammoth cooked up in a lab be a real mammoth or just a funny-looking elephant? How do we choose which species get a second chance? And is there any dino DNA left to get us to Jurassic Park?

Credit:Illustration: Matt Davidson

Theres a story humans tell of saving animals in an ark two of each kind to survive a great catastrophe. Today, the great catastrophe is here, at least for wildlife. Humans are burning through the planets resources with an unprecedented appetite, changing the climate, concreting over the wild. Archer says extinction rates are as high as they were during the Cretaceous period, when 75 per cent of species including the dinosaurs were wiped from the map. In half a century, the World Wildlife Fund calculates, we have lost more than half of the planets biodiversity. Weve now entered the planets sixth mass extinction event, Ritchie says. And, ultimately, humans need these ecosystems to survive, too. Theyre our life support system.

Archer argues that conventional conservation efforts arent cutting the mustard and the time has come for extraordinary intervention - an ark of sorts. Normally, nature fills the vacancies from a big extinction event like this. But were not leaving any room for that this time. So were really in uncharted territory. And we have to be smart.

For some scientists, being smart means conserving sperm, egg and tissue samples from endangered species in cryogenically frozen arks, the same way conservationists might keep breeding pairs in captive populations, in case they can one day be returned to the wild. For Archer and others, being smart means using technology not just to slow down extinction but to reverse it.

Of course, unlike Noah, you will need more than two of a species to bring it back. If de-extinction is to mean more than a few curiosities in a lab or a zoo, scientists recommend a gene pool of at least 50 to 1000 animals to start. And you need to make sure that both the species and the wild youre sending them back into can cope with their return. And thats even before we get to the technology itself.

Laura Dern and Sam Neill starred in Jurassic Park, where ancient dino blood recovered from a mosquito helped recreate the prehistoric past.Credit:Fair Use

Its not quite enough to thaw a frozen mammoth from a block of ice. Scientists need either tissue to clone an animal or enough of its DNA, its genetic blueprint, to engineer it. In Jurassic Park, that source code came from a preserved mosquito with a belly full of dinosaur blood. In real life, that wouldnt actually be enough DNA to rebuild a dinosaur (the little molecule is hardy enough to survive at crime scenes but, after about 1.5 billion years, its too decayed to read anymore). Still, carcasses of mammoths and Neanderthals preserved in the icy permafrost at the top of the world, some of them a million years old, have yielded enough of their genetic code for scientists such as Church to rebuild, and edit. Even the mysterious virus behind the deadly Spanish flu of 1918 was recreated in a lab from the frozen lungs of one of its victims, unearthed from an icy grave in Alaska.

No-ones advocating for the de-extinction of viruses, of course, Church says. But theres a lot more possible than we first imagined.

Since the development of better gene-editing tools such as CRISPR (which borrows the precision of ancient bacteria immune systems to find and edit specific genes), Archer says museum collections, too, have become the flavour of the month. Suddenly everyone wants to go in and sample shrivelled toes [for] the DNA.

Scientists are even learning how to wind back the clock on a living animals family tree, searching for dormant genes switched off over their evolution, such as a tail or bigger teeth, to help revive extinct ancestors, gene by gene. Thats how the paleontologist who inspired Michael Crichtons Jurassic Park in the first place, Jack Horner, is hoping to build a dinosaur from its decidedly less scaly descendant: the chicken. Birds are the dinosaurs that escaped extinction, after all.

Genes even older than [those of] the dinosaurs can be brought back, too, Church says. But its limited. Its hard to reconstruct a [species] entire genome that way. Its not like you have a 3D printer where you say, Print out this organism because the rules are way more powerful than that. Theyre more mysterious. And the question is always, why do it?

Horner himself says hed be looking to turn on only a few lost traits in his dino-chicken (the claws, teeth, arms, scales and the tail to keep the fourth-graders happy). Already, a beak has become a snout in chicken embryos. The tail has proven the most difficult but in recent months weve made headway understanding how [it] evolved from dinosaur to bird. Even so, Horners chickenosaurus wouldnt really be an extinct animal. Itd be a new kind of dinosaur-like bird, he says.

An Asian elephant: they are the closest genetic relative of the mammoth.Credit:Getty Images

Church himself has viable DNA of his mammoth but will still need to pair it with the genome of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to try to bring it back (he sometimes calls the project the mammophant). Likewise, Ben Novak at the genetic rescue and de-extinction group Revive & Restore has big plans to re-engineer and breed an extinct line of North American bird known as the passenger pigeon using existing flocks (hes even done some experiments on birds at the CSIROs secure lab in Melbourne). And Archer plans to turn to the Tasmanian devil as a template to recreate the Tasmanian tiger, after the thylacines genome was at last sequenced from DNA found in teeth specimens at the Australian Museum.

These animals, if they ever come blinking and growling to life in the lab, will be hybrids of the past and the present. But there is a way to bring back an 100 per cent extinct animal, Archer says, and thats cloning.

More than 20 years after Dolly the sheep became the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, the technique is yet to be perfected, but Archer says its not quite the horror show people imagine. While the sci-fi nightmare of cloned humans never materialised, livestock can be cloned to preserve breeding lines, and celebrities and millionaires fork out upwards of $40,000 to clone beloved pets.

Some conservationists are also turning to the technique to stop inbreeding in dwindling wildlife populations. In late 2020, Novak teamed up with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to clone a critically endangered black-footed ferret from the frozen cells of a ferret who died in 1988. The clone, named Elizabeth Ann, is now a healthy six-month-old who is fond of tearing apart paper bags, barking at anyone who invades her personal space, and has three times more genetic variation in her little body than any other [blackfooted] ferret on the planet, Novak says.

Loading

Of course, to clone an animal, the cell you are using must still be intact alive, in a sense. That makes cloning an extinct species almost impossible. But it has happened. In 2003, scientists in Spain cloned an extinct mountain goat known as the Pyrenean ibex from the frozen tissue of the last of its species, Celia.

To clone, you take the egg of a suitably similar host animal, say, a domestic goat, and suck out the DNA-packed nucleus within, replacing it with that of the animal in line for resurrection, in this case, Celia the ibex. Then you hit it with a Frankstein-esque jolt of electricity to fuse the egg and nucleus, and you implant that new egg in a surrogate mother (another goat). If all goes to plan, the DNA will tell the egg to grow an ibex instead. In this case, a baby ibex did arrive but she lived for just 10 minutes, born with a fatal lung defect scientists say can be typical of the species, clone or not.

The gastric brooding frog, which gave birth to live froglets out of its mouth, went extinct shortly after it was discovered.Credit:Mike Tyler

The experiment was never tried again because by then the Spanish government had released goats into the mountains to replace the ibex, and so the team despaired they were too late. The ibex had lost its habitat. It had effectively gone extinct twice.

Archer hopes there will be a happier ending for the gastric-brooding frog, an extinct Australian species hes been working to clone since a colleague discovered some intact tissue cells miraculously still tucked away at the back of an old university freezer. This frog first caught the eye of medical researchers for its bizarre ability to turn its stomach into a womb and vomit up its babies. Nothing else in nature can do that, Archer says. But before it could be studied, in the mid-1980s, it vanished. Then in 2013, Archers team had a breakthrough. The extinct frogs DNA began to replicate when it was implanted in donor frog eggs. Under the microscope, the team watched the embryos start to develop with growing excitement.

But suddenly it just stopped, Archer says. The team believes the problem lies not with the DNA, but with their technique for cloning amphibians. We hit the same wall when we tried a living frogs DNA. We just need to get one [species] back, one of these [de-extinction] projects over the line, and people will see were not making monsters.

A woolly mammoth. Could its DNA be mixed with that of an Asian elephant to create a mammophant?Credit:Getty Images

OK, so Jurassic Park probably wont happen but what about a Pleistocene Park for the king of that Ice Age, the woolly mammoth? These towering herbivores were hunted to extinction by early humans some 10,000 years ago, the very last of them surviving on Arctic islands until 4000 years ago. But the mammoth is still the closest genetic relative to the now endangered Asian elephant. Even closer than the African elephant, Church says.

He believes resurrecting the mammoths ancient genes could stop the Asian elephant from following it into extinction. Splicing in traits that helped the mammoth thrive in the Arctic could open up crucial new habitat, as land-clearing and poaching closer to the equator increasingly whittle down their numbers. Endangered species are already relocated, with varying success, by conservationists, and their genes managed via breeding programs to protect diversity.

Church estimates that editing in about 40 to 100 mammoth genes, chiefly around cold resistance, will be enough to allow Asian elephants to thrive up north. Separate projects have edited about that number in pigs, for different traits, and Church says they are now breeding whole generations of healthy, engineered animals.

In the case of his mammophant, the team would grow the animal in an artificial womb to avoid any risk to the endangered elephant they would otherwise have to use as a surrogate. That means theres an extra hurdle to scale growing a mammal artificially, all the way from fertilisation to birth, hasnt been done before. Church expects to crack the problem in about five years, in mice first, which have a faster gestation period than elephants (20 days versus 22 months). Then itll probably take another five to adapt it to larger animals and then we can see how it scales up for the mammoth.

Loading

If it works, he already has a place to put the herd. Since the 90s, a group of Russian scientists has been transforming a huge swathe of land in Siberia back to the grasslands that mammoths and other large animals once roamed. It really is called Pleistocene Park and, with the mammoths help, some think it could actually slow climate change. Grasslands can absorb more carbon than forests, and mammoths rip down trees and create this tundra as they go. But, more importantly, their heavy feet also trample snow cover, stopping it from acting as insulation and so allowing the permafrost to be chilled by the icy Arctic winds. In theory, Church says this should help slow its thaw, which eventually threatens to release more carbon and methane than the atmosphere holds today.

But Ritchie questions why you would bring back a mammoth, a creature of the Ice Age, to a rapidly warming world? Youre not going to have herds of thousands of mammoths in time to have a real impact on the permafrost, given how fast its melting now with climate change, he says. Youll just end up with an elephant that cant handle the heat, and probably, a freak show. We have to think very carefully about how the world is going to be when we consider what to bring back.

Benjamin, the last thylacine, at Hobart Zoo in 1933.Credit:David Fleay Trustees

Theres not much point resurrecting a species if it will face the same threat of extinction soon after, like the Pyrenean ibex muscled out of its mountains. And de-extinction proponents stress that animals should fill an empty ecological niche too. When wolves were hunted out of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, elk numbers exploded. With no predator to keep them in check, they tore up the grasses and rivers. Suddenly, the beavers had vanished too. And when they brought the wolves back, 70 years later, the ecosystem was restored, Church says.

Of course, for this more classical rewilding to work with a resurrected animal, it needs to act the way its ancestor did. But not everything is encoded in genes. How will an engineered mammophant, for example, learn to migrate across the Arctic tundra as mammoths once did if theres no parent to show it the way? And what if cutting and pasting together species genomes, in this case of elephant and mammoth or thylacine and Tasmanian devil, interferes with other natural instincts?

Loading

These are problems Archer ponders a lot. You could even have two sets of instructions [in the DNA] that are contradictory, he says. But dont forget that the mammoth is a kind of specialised elephant, so most of the genome is already the same. Tasmanian devils, too, are close enough to thylacines, even though theyre smaller. For his part, he believes well have 99 per cent original behaviours in resurrected species. Most behaviour really is gene-deep in animals, he says, even the strange case of the gastric-brooding frog swallowing its fertilised eggs. No frog teaches another frog to do anything, theyre on their own from the moment theyre a tadpole.

In the case of a resurrected thylacine, there wont be much to compare it to. There are few records of how the marsupial lived, so some ecologists warn not enough is known to bring it back safely. Archer is quick to point out that the thylacine vanished from Tasmania only 90 years ago, and from the mainland at the same time as the devil (which is itself being considered for reintroduction over the Bass Strait) some 3200 years ago. We know what its going to do. Its going to become the king of beasts [in Australia] again.

Ben Novak with Martha, the last passenger pigeon, preserved with another of her species. Her death in 1914 galvanised Americas conservation movement.Credit:Revive&Restore

But consider the case of the passenger pigeon Novak hopes to bring back to North America. One hundred and fifty years ago, they were the most abundant bird on the planet. And, though they numbered as many as six billion, Novak says there were only three or four flocks flying the world at any one time. When they moved from forest to forest, they came in like a hurricane or a forest fire, breaking branches, destroying canopies and forcing those woods into regeneration cycles.

No other birds do this, Novak says. They were ecosystem engineers. Some of the restoration we thought fire did to the landscape weve now shown the birds did. Novak argues the forest needs them back. He and his team have sequenced the pigeons genome and compared it to its closest living relative, the bandtailed pigeon. Of the 25-million-odd genes where they differed, Novak has identified about 30 that could be particularly significant in making a pigeon behave like a passenger pigeon, such as disease resistance and, potentially, extra-social behaviour.

So heres his plan: Novak imagines a carefully controlled release, first on a netted reserve with nesting baskets packed into dense trees, encouraging the birds to breed in colonies and, to fool them into thinking they are already part of a much bigger flock, with speakers blasting pigeon calls and coos. If the birds gang up as planned, they would be fitted with GPS trackers and set free, by the thousand or so.

With enough funding, which Novak ballparks at about $US25 million, he thinks he could create a live passenger pigeon in the lab within seven years using CRISPR. Parallel work focused on breeding shows it would only take a few more years to build up a healthy sustainable population of 10,000 birds or so. That wont be enough to make a dent in forests the way the sky-darkening flocks of the last century did. Still, Novak says, its a start.

But does that mean that monster pigeon swarms will start descending on cities like New York? Historically, Novak says, the birds stayed clear of urban centres as there was not enough food. The bigger their flocks get, the more they will stay remote, near tree cover. And, if things do get out of hand, he says we already know what to do: it was just a few decades of hunting that wiped out those billions of birds in the first place.

Strange insects wreak havoc after they emerge from an unearthed mammoth carcass in the TV sci-fi thriller Fortitude.Credit:Fair Use

But suppose passenger pigeon flocks really are too much for American forests already scarred by record wildfires. Or that bizarre little frog becomes the next cane toad. Some have even wondered whether ancient viruses, entangled in the DNA of long-dead species, could be reawakened (cue the buzzing mammoth carcass in the TV sci-fi thriller Fortitude).

Archer, who himself was the first ecologist to sound the alarm on the danger of cane toads in Australia, says the fossil record can offer important clues as to how an ecosystem will fare with a reintroduced species. When he ventured into the Tasmanian bush with one of the last people to see thylacines in the wild, he found their habitat was broadly unchanged since the 1930s. Peter Ward, in his 90s on the hike, had trapped and hunted the tigers as a boy with his father and brother, back when there was a bounty on the marsupials head (due to now-debunked fears that thylacines were eating livestock). At the end of the track, Wards family hut was still there, just as hed left it, tins of food still on the shelf. Tears came into his eyes, Archer says. He even remembered what they sounded like. He said theyd make this yip yip yip sound as they circled the hut at night. The forest hasnt moved on.

Loading

Novak says ecosystems are not a house of cards. When they have the right pillars our keystone species like predators and pollinators and herds then theyre more like a tower that an earthquake wobbles, but it doesnt collapse.

Besides, Church adds, the larger the animal, the easier a reintroduction is to reverse. Just as feral goats were removed from the Galapagos Islands, rounding up wayward mammoths wouldnt be impossible.

But while thylacines could help with Australias feral cat problem, as dingoes do on the mainland, Archer says its not quite a wolves-in-Yellowstone situation. Theyre not going to be chasing the big animals. In Tasmania, where there are no dingoes, thylacines would be competing for smaller prey with the Tasmanian devil. On the mainland, it might put pressure on the quoll too. These are both endangered species themselves, and so the thylacines impact would have to be closely monitored, Archer says, released as a trial in fenced areas first.

But 99 per cent of the time, with some careful planning, what happens is what you intend. This is the part of conservation we already know how to do well.

Indeed, for all the focus on worst-case scenarios, Novak says he could only find one instance of a conservation reintroduction backfiring, after analysing more than a century of US rewildings: when moving some endangered water birds into a wetland in 1988 caused others in the area to die off.

In America, regulators have now green-lit the worlds first release of a de-extinct species: a chestnut tree. Once the most abundant on the continent, the towering tree has been genetically engineered to survive the imported fungus that wiped it out eight decades ago. Some Native American tribes have even agreed to replant it on native land. Regulating the chestnuts return was no easy task and Novak hopes it will now be a guiding light for future de-extinctions, though he admits mammoths and pigeons are a whole different ball game to trees.

People just fell in love with Elizabeth Ann, Novak says of the cloned blackfooted ferret, pictured here as a baby.

But, just as gene-editing can bring back life, it can also end it. Gene drives hold awesome power to accelerate evolution and take out feral populations by spreading edits that disadvantage or kill a pest species quickly. Scientists have even proposed such an approach to tackle the mouse plague gripping Australias east. Novak says gene drives must be used carefully, but sometimes the risk of doing nothing, whether thats gene drives or de-extinction ... is actually a lot worse.

For scientists eyeing de-extinction projects, there are a lot of vacancies out in the wild in need of filling. Novak says the technologies being developed will benefit existing endangered species too as their gene pools narrow, from the black-footed ferret to the northern white rhino, pictured below. The passenger pigeons and the mammoths, theyre our moon shots, he says. This is never going to replace traditional conservation.

But others worry that critical funding will be taken away from on-the-ground recovery efforts and shunted into pie-in-the-sky de-extinction projects. Australia has some of the worlds highest extinction rates but spends a tenth of what the US does on conservation efforts. De-extinction, if proven to work, will still carry a higher price tag than traditional conservation. At this late hour, Ritchie says, funnelling more funding into proven methods is a safer bet.

A northern white rhino: there are only two females left. Credit:Getty Images

Novak understands the concern but says funding for de-extinction projects so far generally comes from sources not already investing in conservation, such as big tech. Weve tried hard [at Revive & Restore] to get money from new places like biotech companies, even Facebook. Since the not-for-profit was founded by conservationist Stewart Brand in 2012, Novak says about 90 per cent of the funding its raised has been spent on genetic rescue, such as their work with ferrets, not de-extinction. With the birth of Elizabeth Ann, he says those projects are advancing enough that they might begin to compete with traditional conservation. But in conservation, we always fight for funding to re-introduce this species or that one. Its always triage.

Archer, who says money for his own frog project comes primarily from people interested in the technology rather than the frog, stresses that forcing a choice between de-extinction and conservation will crush innovation. In Australia, where life has evolved over the past 50 million years cut off from the other continents, he says the case for de-extinction is especially strong. We have this added responsibility because our animals just dont exist anywhere else. Were a whole distinct branch of the global genome.

Loading

Ritchie recalls the story of an Australian naturalist who took a taxidermied northern quoll into parts of the Northern Territory where it had vanished. A local Aboriginal woman just held it, crying, when she saw it again. It was one of her totemic species, and that pain, that loss, was still so strong.

Archer and Church say de-extinction could help end the doom and gloom of conservation, turning it around from an unwinnable war into something that could capture the publics attention (and perhaps real funding). But will the path there be littered with ghastly mistakes, animals trapped in awful lives because of editing blunders?

Genetic powers the most awesome force the world has ever seen but you wield it like a kid whos found his dads gun, Jeff Goldblums character Dr Ian Malcolm warns in Jurassic Park.

How can we stand in the light of discovery and not act? counters the parks creator John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough.

Like Benjamin the thylacine, many of the species we have lost in the past century or two also died of the cold of our indifference, our cruelty, our thoughtlessness. But does that mean we have a moral obligation to bring them back, as Brand says, to a world that misses them?

Read the original:

The de-extinction club: Could we resurrect mammoths, Tassie tigers and dinosaurs? - Sydney Morning Herald

Between 15,000 and 25,000 years ago, humans started hanging out with a particularly friendly breed of wolves: dogs. Scientists assume that these ancient pooches were first drawn to our settlements by the smell of human food and poop. We began sharing our scraps with them, hunting with them, eventually breeding the ones we liked best. This is how dogs evolved to mirror us, and how we became obsessed with them. While monkeys and pigs have more right-brain strategic grit, the dog possesses a human-facing emotional intelligence. More than mans best friend, we engineered a creature that would be a more reliable friend to us than we are to each other. And so, it has accompanied us in this long game of civilization. At this point in our evolutionary friendship, we get a hit of oxytocin when we look into our dogs eyes, the love hormone, the same burst that occurs when we first look into the eyes of our newborn baby an evolutionary trick that, in both cases, prevents us from throwing them out.

Our obsession with dogs has come a long way since our early days of hunting and gathering together. Where birth rates decline, canines increasingly replace children. Rich cosmopolitan types source them from all over the world, emblems of their uniqueness, after reading up about the characteristics of each breed. They read books to understand their designer dogs behavior, a flourishing subgenre of science writing. They identify with their dogs, psychoanalyze them, create Instagram accounts in their name, spend more and more on their accessories, feed them ethically, even medicate them if necessary. But after 7 to 15 years, on average, their beloved pet still dies. And then the superrich dog-lover faces a painful choice: buy another dog of the same breed or reincarnate their beloved friend for $50,000.

Commercial pet cloning has been a growing industry since Texas-based biotech company ViaGen first started offering it to Americans in 2015, but many of its customers still prefer to remain anonymous. Commissioning a clone is a deeply personal choice, one often made by a rich person mourning a recently deceased pet and it is still far from being a widely accepted practice. There are spurious reasons for this (a perceived affront against nature) but there are also well-founded bio-ethical concerns. The process is relatively inefficient and usually requires impregnating multiple host dogs to produce a single clone, which means many traumatic pregnancies and many dead clones.

Our obsession with dogs has come a long way since our early days of hunting and gathering together

Photo by Marc Pell on Unsplash

But the love of a wealthy pet widow, who refuses to settle for another dog, can override all those concerns. One of the key selling points of cloning is the customers devotion to their dogs personalityand an underlying belief that behavior is heritable, a logical continuation of the popular idea that different breeds have a particular habitusthe kind of genetic determinism that still seems acceptable when it comes to our pets. Pet cloning companies encourage this notion. They cant promise that a clone will act like its predecessor, but they do their best to insinuate as much with supportive case studies. This, their critics allege, is how they fleece grieving pet owners. Buying and selling hope, the customer and the company embark on a small-scale genetic experiment. Together, they are spawning new evolutionary strains of mans best friend. But the question remains: to what end?

We drove to a tax free state to receive it, so that we wouldnt have to pay taxes on the clone, says Jordan (name changed). [Clones] arent cheap.

The LA-based artist rented a room in a desert motel and waited there with a cocktail of feelings: determination, doubt, elation, grief. In the room next door, a ViaGen employee was waiting with a litter of four puppiesall exact genetic copies of Jordans dearly departed Boxer. Many cloning attempts yield no clones whatsoever; some produce several. If youre lucky, like Jordan, you get four clones for the price of one.

Jordan took turns receiving each of the puppies and evaluating them. I sat like a queen on a throne in an empty hotel room, while each one was brought in to me, so that I could spend 10 minutes with it and sort of get to know its temperament, to see, like, were they the same? Or were they different? Ten minutes with each puppy turned out not to be enough, so Jordan took the entire litter home with him. [I] rotated each one out for an hour on my lap. It was quite amazing. Because the very first one that I put on my lap turns out to be [the One], upside down like this with his mouth open, sleeping, snoring, just like sitting in my lap exactly like [my old dog] would do. It was the same face, the same mannerism. It was wild.

Jordans original dog was beautifulin his words, the Kendall Jenner of Boxersand the clone looked almost identical. But having a gorgeous clone wasnt enough; the copy would also have to be that one soulmate special dog. Jordan was looking for that heritable behavior. He had done research on the topic. For monozygotic twins separated at birth and raised completely differently, the correlation coefficient is about .75, he says. Behavioral geneticists refer to this question as the heritability coefficient, the proportion of variance in a specific temperamental trait in the population that is due to genetic differences.

ViaGens representatives and copywriters take great pains not to promise that your clone will match the original on the character front, but they do suggest that its a possibility. On their website, they answer the question of heritable behavior with observations and customer testimonials tales of cloned cows who roll their tongues just like their previous iterations, cats who roll their Rs the same way as their predecessors. Embryologist Dennis Milutinovich, ViaGens cloning lab manager, offers anecdotal evidence in the same vein. I, personally, am convinced that behavior is probably 75% genetic, and everything else, nurture, is 25%, he says to me on Zoom. Thats just based off my own viewing and experience with the clones. His colleague, Chief Science Officer Shawn Walker, is more measured. Its the same genetic makeup, [and] genetics makes up all the characteristics of the animal, but we dont know how it affects behavior. But what I can say is I have been overwhelmingly surprised at how much it appears behavior is controlled by genetics, based on the feedback we get from the clients.

Jordan (who gave the three other clones away to friends) has taken the supposed 25% nurture that forms a dogs personality into his own hands. If youre doing this because its such a fantastic dog, then I feel like you should try and make as many parameters the same. He has done his best to replicate the conditions and routines of his old dogs upbringing as precisely as possible. But no amount of effort could have made the replication perfect, and there are some differences between the dogs. The new one is more confident and less scared of trucks. Hes cuddlier than the original, and, Jordan admits, also a little bit naughtier. He almost sounds...better.

RePet, the fictional pet-cloning company in Roger Spottiswoodes campy techno-thriller The 6th Day (2000), has a more forward sales pitch than ViaGen. Your RePet Oliver will be exactly the same dog. Hell know all the same tricks you taught him, hell remember where all the bones are buried, he wont even know hes a clone. Arnold Schwarzeneggers Thanksgiving box office bomb gets a lot right about the future pet cloning industry, and American capitalism generally: the more controversial the industry, the cheesier the brand identity. ViaGen Pets. Love that lasts forever, the companys website promises.

Katy, a ViaGen customer, says that after her clone was born, the company would send her weekly progress reports that included photos of the puppy in miniature potemkin villages. (It was this strange kind of space thats made to look like a whole little town [with] fake grass and fake little streets and stuff They created a simulacrum of a kind of Pleasantville-style town, with all fuzzy items, like fuzzy little cars, little fuzzy dog toys.) Her friend Garrett chimes in, You have to see the reports because its literally Philip K. Dick. Like, it is Total Recall. Its like, ViaGen Pets: For a better tomorrow, or, So the past never leaves, or something. Cute pet pics and inspirational copy are ViaGens marketing bread and butter. Just as many animal products feature a smiling cow somewhere in their artwork, a controversial industry like pet cloning requires a lot of cutesy gloss. ViaGen which also clones cats (for $35,000) and livestockdoes its best not to trouble customers with the slightly messy process enabling their pets rebirth.

Milutinovich gives me the rundown of a standard embryo implantation process. We have a vet on staff, she works exclusively with us doing surgeries and a lot of animal care and stuff like that. Shell just make a small midline incision and exteriorize the ovary and just take my embryos into a little catheter, go right into the oviduct of the ovary, and plunge those in. Whole procedure takes ten minutes maybe. Tuck that back in, stitch it up, and hopefully you have a pregnant surrogate. (Thats a pretty good basic overview of it, Walker confirms in his distinctive Virginia drawl. The only difference between species, between cats and dogs and horses, would be that for horses wed do a nonsurgical transfer.)

The process hasnt evolved much since Dolly the Sheep was born in 1996. Milutinovich and his staff use a process called enucleation to prepare a surrogates oocyte the mothers egg cell to accept another dogs DNA. First, they stain the surrogates DNA in the oocytes nucleus. Then UV light is flashed on it so that it glows in the dark and a tiny little needle is used to suck out the DNA. Next, the nucleus of a somatic cell from the original animal is injected into the enucleated oocyte with the tiny needle. Milutinovich and team then zap the oocyte with electricity until the inserted cell fuses into its ooplasm an eggs cytoplasm. The next step is a process called activation, in which the newly fused cell is pulsed with electricity until it kicks into gear and begins to function like a naturally fertilized oocyte in other words, it begins to develop. After that, its only a matter of implanting it and hoping for the best.

Articles critical of the pet cloning industry dwell on a number of ethically ambiguous aspects of the embryo development and implantation processes. A 2018 article in Smithsonian Magazine describes the cloning of a dog named Snuppy: Many cloned pregnancies dont take hold in the uterus or die shortly after birth, as was the case with Snuppys twin. Snuppy and his twin were two of only three pregnancies that resulted from more than 1,000 embryos implanted into 123 surrogates. An advisor to a South Korean dog cloning company is quoted as saying: You need a good number of dogs to do this type of cloning. I would say its about 20 percent. Very high. That means four female dogs enduring a traumatic pregnancy, and four clone babies dying, to reincarnate one rich persons dog. Bio-ethicist Jessica Pierce,writing in theNew York Times, went as far as to say that the pet cloning industry was creating a whole canine underclass that remains largely invisible to us but whose bodies serve as a biological substrate.

Walker acknowledges that he and his team encounter non-viable embryos and birth defects, but he defends ViaGens processes by referring me to the horror of traditional breeding practices. Obviously we dont like to get into that discussion a whole lot, but if you talk to any dog or cat breeder, pig breeder, theres a number of animals that basically do have congenital defectsand so we do encounter those just like everybody else does in the breeding world.

Breeding clones of our pets is the easy part, but replicating their personalities is far more difficult

Photo by FLOUFFY on Unsplash

ViaGen (The worldwide leader in cloning the animals we love) are emphatic about their love for animals. I think the one thing youll find isas a general group, the company is big-time animal lovers, Walker tells me. ViaGens Chief Science Officer peppers his cutest anecdotes like the one about a bucking horse who liked to have his tongue scratched, or a bull named Chance whose clone was christened Second Chance with folksy turns of phrase. The foals in there just lovin on the girls, he says. The guy would have it alongside the road and set kids on itjust a big ol bull, ya know? Lab manager Milutinovich is an animal lover too. I have a surrogate cat that had our second litter of cloned cats. I brought her home and shes the best cat ever, he told me, in an effort to allay my concerns about the fate of surrogate animals. I have a toy poodle, Walker jumps in, and now I got an eight-month-old Great Dane thats grown like mad.

Asked about the specific number of surgeries that surrogates endure before retirement, Milutinovich demurs, then tries to reassure me. We keep it very reasonable, because obviously, we dont want any more work for these animals than they absolutely need to [do]. After a few litters, theyre feeling pretty good and we tend to give them a good home. How ViaGen determines when surrogates are feeling pretty good Milutinovich did not explain.

Their way of selecting surrogates made for slightly more pleasant conversation. According to Walker, the key is to find a dog with great maternal instincts. Additionally, they should be docile and easy to work with. One thing that customers sometimes find surprising as in Katys case is that the surrogates dont have to be the same breed as the clones theyll give birth to. I actually asked too many questions, kind of breaking the fourth wall of the experience, she told me. When she asked about the mothers breed, she was told it was a beagle, but no other details about the surrogates experiences were made available.

Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into a RePet outlet in a shopping mall. On a screen embedded in the wall, a smarmy infomercial host intones, Your pet doesnt want to break your heart. Thanks to RePet, he doesnt have to. An eager sales associate sidles up to Arnold.

You lost a dog, right?

Yes, my daughters.

Oh, what a heartbreak. Whatd you say his name was again?

Oliver.

Well, Olivers in luck, because were having a special this week: 20% off. When did Oliver die?

Sometime this morning.

Oh, thats perfect. We can still do a post-mortem syncording. But you gotta act fast, because theres only a 12-hour window on deceased brains.

I have a problem with that whole idea. I mean, suppose the clones have no soul, or theyre dangerous?

Cloned pets are every bit as safe as real pets. Plus, theyre insured.

Arnold seriously considers the proposition and says: Let me think about that. I might be back. The associate responds with another nod to Schwarzeneggers most beloved franchise: Youll be back. ViaGen has a way of pushing this same sales pitch a little bit harder. A pets DNA is only useful for cloning in the immediate aftermath of its death, and ViaGen offers desperate pet widows the opportunity to store that DNA in liquid nitrogen for $1600, just in case they may want to clone it one day. Only 10% of customers end up going forward with the whole procedure, but its nice to think that a bit of your old friend (usually a four-millimeter punch of abdominal tissue) is still alive somewhere, in case you get rich. Though some customers have the foresight to clone their dog while still alive, ViaGens sales pitch is aimed squarely at mourners.

In January 2020, Katy and her fianc Scott adopted a Basset hound named Jenny, who died two weeks later in a gruesome elevator accident. It was horrific, her friend Garret says, something that no one should ever have to go through. The pain gave birth to a plan. I dont quite remember because I was in such a state of grief, says Katy, but I believe some kind of idea started percolating between Scott and Garrett, both of whom are kind of futurists in their own right, and also great, execution-oriented people who solve problems. And thats kind of how Scott, I would say, grieves.

Katy had some misgivings. As soon as she and Scott had retained ViaGen and gotten this clone situation on track, she decided to pursue what might be a slightly healthier solution. While ViaGens embryologists in Rochester were plunging oocytes into surrogates oviducts, Katy hired a private investigator in Dallas an ex-Navy SEAL to find Jennys original mother. When the PI found the owners, there was one puppy left from the original litter, but they were using him as a breeder dog. The PI tried to negotiate but couldnt make a deal As soon as we wanted to offer them money they started to think that theyd gotten the golden goose with these dogs and returned to Dallas empty-handed. Katy and Scott were starting to lose hope. But then, one December day, they got a call from ViaGen saying they had a viable pregnancy and a new Jenny was on the way. Katy was elated, sensing the possibility of imminent relief from her grief and guilt.

The day she got the call, a severe winter storm hit the tri-state area. It would receive nicknames like the Groundhog Day noreaster and dump a foot of snow on New York City and over three feet on some parts of the Eastern Seaboard. But, after a year of waiting, a super-blizzard wasnt enough to stop Katy. She ploughed from Tribeca to Rochester, with Garret and her other pet Basset hound Lucy in tow. They pulled into a snowed-in Chick-Fil-A parking lot next to a lone Subaru. A ViaGen vet tech emerged with a small crate, which he safely stowed in her back seat, before handing her a water bowl and some puppy food and driving away. Garrett says the whole experience was very weird and kind of impersonal. This didnt bother Katy. Puppy was so cute! she recalls. Puppy was also shivering. But not everyone was pleased. Lucy, the other Basset hound, did not receive Jenny 2.0 well.

Katys new dog would turn out to be quite different much more sinister than Jenny. It just seems like a little bit of a satanic version of the original dog, she told me. The puppy likes to kind of bite your face. Not in, like, a bite-bite-bite way, but in a kind-of like gnaw-gnaw-gnaw way. And thats a little maniacal. Garrett put a finer point on it by comparing the young clone to Damien, the boy Antichrist from the 1976 supernatural thriller The Omen. But after a year of uncertainty and regret, Katy and Scott are happy to make a go of it. After shelling out the equivalent of a years college tuition, they dont really have a choice. Though sad for Katy, Jenny 2.0s sinister streak is a victory for nurture over nature, particularity over pure biology, a happy ending if you have the right politics.

After all these cogitations, the same question remains: was it worth all the money and, more importantly, all the animal sacrifice? Unlike space-bound dogs, surrogate pets and their spawn do not go down in history as pioneers. The outcome of their labor is at best a scientific curiosity. For now, there are few of them, but that may soon change. The price of commercial pet cloning has already halved since its inception and is expected to decrease further. Technological innovations could help boost its popularity, particularly our continued efforts to tap into the animal mind.

In The 6th Day, a pets personality is transferred to its clone via a process called syncording. That could be a possibility soon, according to Milutinovich. Were getting there, he says, drawing hope from Elon Musks Neuralink and a Chinese companys questionable efforts to copy a cats memory. This is still a long shot, luckily, a bubble in a bubble. Our pets uniquely mysterious minds are the only aspect of their lives still beyond our control their last bastions of privacy from our relentless affection.

Read the rest here:

Inside the complicated, messy world of pet cloning - Massive Science

PODCAST: Twa Teams, One Street - Cloning Logan Chalmers and Sheridan Satisfaction - Evening Telegraph Calendar An icon of a desk calendar. Cancel An icon of a circle with a diagonal line across. Caret An icon of a block arrow pointing to the right. Email An icon of a paper envelope. Facebook An icon of the Facebook "f" mark. Google An icon of the Google "G" mark. Linked In An icon of the Linked In "in" mark. Logout An icon representing logout. Profile An icon that resembles human head and shoulders. Telephone An icon of a traditional telephone receiver. Tick An icon of a tick mark. Is Public An icon of a human eye and eyelashes. Is Not Public An icon of a human eye and eyelashes with a diagonal line through it. Folder An icon of a paper folder. Breaking An icon of an exclamation mark on a circular background. Camera An icon of a digital camera. Caret An icon of a caret arrow. Clock An icon of a clock face. Close An icon of the an X shape. Ellipsis An icon of 3 horizontal dots. Envelope An icon of a paper envelope. Facebook An icon of a facebook f logo. Camera An icon of a digital camera. Home An icon of a house. Instagram An icon of the Instagram logo. Linked In An icon of the Linked In logo. Magnifying Glass An icon of a magnifying glass. Next An icon of an arrow pointing to the right. Notice An explanation mark centred inside a circle. Previous An icon of an arrow pointing to the left. Rating An icon of a star. Tag An icon of a tag. Video Camera An icon of a video camera shape. All Sections

View post:

PODCAST: Twa Teams, One Street - Cloning Logan Chalmers and Sheridan Satisfaction - Evening Telegraph

By MATT OBRIEN and BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writers

The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice-cloning software to make the late chef Anthony Bourdain say words he never spoke has drawn criticism amid ethical concerns about use of the powerful technology.

The movie Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain appeared in cinemas Friday and mostly features real footage of the beloved celebrity chef and globe-trotting television host before he died in 2018. But its director, Morgan Neville, told The New Yorker that a snippet of dialogue was created using artificial intelligence technology.

Thats renewed a debate about the future of voice-cloning technology, not just in the entertainment world but in politics and a fast-growing commercial sector dedicated to transforming text into realistic-sounding human speech.

Unapproved voice cloning is a slippery slope, said Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of voice generator Descript, in a blog post Friday. As soon as you get into a world where youre making subjective judgment calls about whether specific cases can be ethical, it wont be long before anything goes.

Before this week, most of the public controversy around such technologies focused on the creation of hard-to-detect deepfakes using simulated audio and/or video and their potential to fuel misinformation and political conflict.

But Mason, who previously founded and led Groupon, said in an interview that Descript has repeatedly rejected requests to bring back a voice, including from people who have lost someone and are grieving.

Its not even so much that we want to pass judgment, he said. Were just saying you have to have some bright lines in whats OK and whats not.

Angry and uncomfortable reactions to the voice cloning in the Bourdain case reflect expectations and issues of disclosure and consent, said Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, a nonprofit working on using video technology for human rights. Obtaining consent and disclosing the technowizardry at work would have been appropriate, he said. Instead, viewers were stunned first by the fact of the audio fakery, then by the directors seeming dismissal of any ethical questions and expressed their displeasure online.

It touches also on our fears of death and ideas about the way people could take control of our digital likeness and make us say or do things without any way to stop it, Gregory said.

Director Morgan Neville attends the premiere of "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" during the 20th Tribeca Festival at Brookfield Place on Friday, June 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Neville hasnt identified what tool he used to recreate Bourdains voice but said he used it for a few sentences that Bourdain wrote but never said aloud.

With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used AI technology, Neville said in a written statement. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tonys words come alive.

Neville also told GQ magazine that he got the approval of Bourdains widow and literary executor. The chefs wife, Ottavia Busia, responded by tweet: I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.

Although tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have dominated text-to-speech research, there are now also a number of startups like Descript that offer voice-cloning software. The uses range from talking customer service chatbots to video games and podcasting.

Many of these voice cloning companies prominently feature an ethics policy on their website that explains the terms of use. Of nearly a dozen firms contacted by The Associated Press, many said they didnt recreate Bourdains voice and wouldnt have if asked. Others didnt respond.

We have pretty strong polices around what can be done on our platform, said Zohaib Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto company that sells a custom AI voice generator service. When youre creating a voice clone, it requires consent from whoevers voice it is.

Ahmed said the rare occasions where hes allowed some posthumous voice cloning were for academic research, including a project working with the voice of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.

Ahmed said a more common commercial use is to edit a TV ad recorded by real voice actors and then customize it to a region by adding a local reference. Its also used to dub anime movies and other videos, by taking a voice in one language and making it speak a different language, he said.

He compared it to past innovations in the entertainment industry, from stunt actors to greenscreen technology.

Just seconds or minutes of recorded human speech can help teach an AI system to generate its own synthetic speech, though getting it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdains voice probably took a lot more training, said Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University who runs another voice-generating company, VocaliD, that focuses on customer service chatbots.

If you wanted it to speak really like him, youd need a lot, maybe 90 minutes of good, clean data, she said. Youre building an algorithm that learns to speak like Bourdain spoke.

Neville is an acclaimed documentarian who also directed the Fred Rogers portrait Wont You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom. He began making his latest movie in 2019, more than a year after Bourdains death by suicide in June 2018.

Go here to read the rest:

The new Anthony Bourdain documentary clones his voice, and its creeping people out - PennLive

The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice-cloning software to make the late chef Anthony Bourdain say words he never spoke has drawn criticism amid ethical concerns about use of the powerful technology.

The movie Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain appeared in cinemas Friday and mostly features real footage of the beloved celebrity chef and globe-trotting television host before he died in 2018. But its director, Morgan Neville, told The New Yorker that a snippet of dialogue was created using artificial intelligence technology.

Thats renewed a debate about the future of voice-cloning technology, not just in the entertainment world but in politics and a fast-growing commercial sector dedicated to transforming text into realistic-sounding human speech.

Unapproved voice cloning is a slippery slope, said Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of voice generator Descript, in a blog post Friday. As soon as you get into a world where youre making subjective judgment calls about whether specific cases can be ethical, it wont be long before anything goes.

Before this week, most of the public controversy around such technologies focused on the creation of hard-to-detect deepfakes using simulated audio and/or video and their potential to fuel misinformation and political conflict.

But Mason, who previously founded and led Groupon, said in an interview that Descript has repeatedly rejected requests to bring back a voice, including from people who have lost someone and are grieving.

Its not even so much that we want to pass judgment, he said. Were just saying you have to have some bright lines in whats OK and whats not.

Angry and uncomfortable reactions to the voice cloning in the Bourdain case reflect expectations and issues of disclosure and consent, said Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, a nonprofit working on using video technology for human rights. Obtaining consent and disclosing the technowizardry at work would have been appropriate, he said. Instead, viewers were stunned first by the fact of the audio fakery, then by the directors seeming dismissal of any ethical questions and expressed their displeasure online.

It touches also on our fears of death and ideas about the way people could take control of our digital likeness and make us say or do things without any way to stop it, Gregory said.

Neville hasnt identified what tool he used to recreate Bourdains voice but said he used it for a few sentences that Bourdain wrote but never said aloud.

With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used AI technology, Neville said in a written statement. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tonys words come alive.

Neville also told GQ magazine that he got the approval of Bourdains widow and literary executor. The chefs wife, Ottavia Busia, responded by tweet: I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.

Although tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have dominated text-to-speech research, there are now also a number of startups like Descript that offer voice-cloning software. The uses range from talking customer service chatbots to video games and podcasting.

Many of these voice cloning companies prominently feature an ethics policy on their website that explains the terms of use. Of nearly a dozen firms contacted by The Associated Press, many said they didnt recreate Bourdains voice and wouldnt have if asked. Others didnt respond.

We have pretty strong polices around what can be done on our platform, said Zohaib Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto company that sells a custom AI voice generator service. When youre creating a voice clone, it requires consent from whoevers voice it is.

Ahmed said the rare occasions where hes allowed some posthumous voice cloning were for academic research, including a project working with the voice of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.

Ahmed said a more common commercial use is to edit a TV ad recorded by real voice actors and then customize it to a region by adding a local reference. Its also used to dub anime movies and other videos, by taking a voice in one language and making it speak a different language, he said.

He compared it to past innovations in the entertainment industry, from stunt actors to greenscreen technology.

Just seconds or minutes of recorded human speech can help teach an AI system to generate its own synthetic speech, though getting it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdains voice probably took a lot more training, said Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University who runs another voice-generating company, VocaliD, that focuses on customer service chatbots.

If you wanted it to speak really like him, youd need a lot, maybe 90 minutes of good, clean data, she said. Youre building an algorithm that learns to speak like Bourdain spoke.

Neville is an acclaimed documentarian who also directed the Fred Rogers portrait Wont You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom. He began making his latest movie in 2019, more than a year after Bourdains death by suicide in June 2018.

Read more:

Why the Anthony Bourdain voice cloning creeps people out - Associated Press

getty

Over the last year or so, Twitter carried out an act of high-tech petit larceny: swiping what originally was Snapchats idea for a Stories function, where users publish ephmeral content to all their followers, and adding it to its app. Twitter called its version Fleets, since, well, the photos, text and video there enjoyed only fleeting existences.

This sort of theft is common place in Silicon Valley, and unless a business wants to lock horns with an opponent in a costly legal battle, theres not much to do about itexcept hope the copy-cat ends up meeting the same end as Fleets. Yep, the features a goner. Twitter said earlier this week it would remove Fleets on August 3, less than a year after it making widely available to users.

Plenty of other copy-cat products have perished, struggled or plain fizzled out in similar fashion. When Apple debuted Siri, Google and Microsoft both tried to come up with virtual assistants of their own (Google Now and Cortana, respectively). In a related sense. Spotify begat the less sucessful Apple Music. Likewise, Microsofts Surface Tablet and Apples iPad Proas well as Amazons connected home device Echo and Googles Google Home.

Cloning a competitor isnt a particularly noble pursuit. But probably the worst possible thing is making a imitation product that flops. Indeed, theres a way to produce a successful knockoff, and as Twitter and these others have found, a wrong way, too.

Probably the most obvious example of a successful bit of technological pilfering is what Instagram did with Stories back in 2016. Snapchat had pioneered the feature on its blossoming app, and it caught the attention of a young developer at Facebook, Michael Sayman, then 19. He noticed how frequently his friends sent messages through Snapchats Stories. It was huge with my friends, everyone was using it, he says. And with Facebook already feeling newly under pressure from Snapchat, Sayman brought up the matter in a meeting with CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

On Saymans urging, Facebook decided to first roll out its version of Stories on Instagram, which it had bought in 2012. It moved quickly: It saw the threat and met it, while Twitter would wait nearly five years to bolt on Stories to the top of its app. Even more importantly, Instagram offered some key improvements, something else that fouled up Fleets. Users could post saved photos to Instagram Stories. Eventually, Instagam would add things like Q&As, polls and links.

There was something else important about Stories. It gave Instagram users a different way to use the app. By 2016, the platform had already developed a reputation as the place to post glossy, glamorous photos. The disappearing Stories let users publish content that didnt met those standards, items you were comfortable seeing evaporate the next day. (And by contrast, Fleets didnt really offer Twitter users anything novel. Most standard tweets are pretty short-lived by nature, mostly passing thoughts.)

And more simply, Instagram offered a wider means of distribution for Stories. On Snapchat, users generally had only friends or close contacts to share Stories with or whoever had their phone number. Instagram gave people the chance to share Stories with anyone following their account. So a picture posted on Instagram Stories would be more likely to attract more engagement than one on Snapchat, an alluring prospect.

You can't literally just copy a feature and stick it on another app and guarantee that it's going to work. I think most cases that wouldn't work, Sayman says. When Instagram took the approach with Stories, it was much more about: how you provide a similar value. Key word: similar, not duplicative.

Instagrams gambit paid off. By 2018, Instagram stories had nearly 400 million daily users, while Snapchats growth had largely plateaued at half that figure.

The question of whether a knockoff can work will come up again soon with TikTok. It announced earlier this month two seperate acts of mimicry: Its going after Cameo with a marketplace for users to comission videos from influencers and taking a swipe at LinkedIn with TikTok Resumes, a part of its social network structured around video CVs.

Cameo CEO and cofounder Steve Galanis feels comfortable from where hes seated. He reasons that TikTok will fall into another trap for copy-cats: It will only half-heartedly pursue the task without brigning its full resources to bare. A marketplace to connect fans and celebs is the reason we exist. Its not the reason TikTok exists, Galanis says. If you have a product like that, TikToks best people arent going to be working on it. So its critical that our best people are better than the people at TikTok, and we continue to execute on our roadmap. As it happens, outrunning a larcenous rival is as a good way as any to contend with the situation.

Continued here:

How To Copy Your Business Rivals Idea And Get Away With It - Forbes