Hybrids & Chimeras, Real & Imagined: Crossing Forbidden Boundaries in the Animal Kingdom

so good afternoon everyone can you hear me in the back glance I'm Anne Kenny I'm uh proud to be the Carl a Croc University librarian at this great institution and I want to welcome all of you to the library's annual reunion lecture which will be given by Dr Doug anac um his talk ties in well with the current exhibit at uh Cornell Library uh animal legends from the Trojan Horse to Godzilla what's not to like about an exhibit with that kind of title but the exhibit in part addresses uh the power of our relationship with animals uh many of us experience that power through the context of companionship and affection but some people believe that connection goes even deeper encompassing not only physical but mental health it's generally accepted that by petting a dog or a cat or some other Fuzzy Friend one can relieve stress lower your blood pressure lower your heart rate and uh just feel happier there may be serious medical implications too in a much cited study from 1980 in the Journal of Public Health reports uh it showed that patients who had been hospitalized because of some form of heart disease were more likely to to stay healthy if they went home where there was a pet a year after hospital stays 28% of patients who did not own a pet had died uh compared to just 6% who did of course the evidence uh is far from conclusive and subsequent Studies have not definitively borne out that correlation but it's clear that the human animal relationship runs deep more proof exists for the softer side of science uh witnessed the last few decades where there's been a huge proliferation of therapy programs that involve pets visiting hospitals uh assisted living facilities and other places where people under stress can benefit from uh their calming influence and libraries too are getting into the ACT uh with early literacy program springing up at public libraries across the country that pairs children children with their dogs to come to the library to read and this spring Yale Law Library began allowing stressed out students uh to check out a therapy dog for a 30 minute uh session citing the dog's positive uh effect on emotional well-being I don't know what effect it had on their grades but the program which involved an 11-year-old uh Jack Russell border terrier mix uh called called Monty was so successful that it's been extended uh for the fall semester as well and I'm pleased to let you all know that we've just recruited the originator of this program femi Cadmus to direct uh the law library and she arrives in August Lord knows what she's bringing with her all these connections suggest that Society is still revising the conversation we have with ourselves about animals and the language we use the actual words we choose is a big part of that conversation you may have caught the story uh coming from the UK in which the editors of the Journal of animal ethics called on people to NX the word pet uh arguing that the term is dismissive instead they suggest people should call domestic animals like dogs and cats and hamsters and Geral and canaries and yes lizards companion animals and in place of pet owners they suggest human carers although this does sound a little bit far-fetched the editors believe derogatory language about animals can affect the way they are treated this new conversation the idea of re-exploring the ground that we once thought we understood is also hinted at in the title of Dr Anzac talk hybrids and chimeras real and imagined Crossing forbidden boundaries in the animal kingdom Dr Anzac has made important contributions in the fields of eoin Immunology genetics and reproduction he's a corelan graduated with a ba in 1969 and was captain of the University Polo team and Polo has remained important to him and his family you have two daughters Doug who were uh on the polo team uh after completing a degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 he then went on to Cambridge where he received his PhD and since 1979 he's been on the scientific staff of Cornell's Baker's Institute for animal health and in 1992 he was appointed the Dorothy haire mcconville professor of ewine medicine at the veterinary uh College before I turn the Podium over to him I want to thank those responsible for the animals Legends exhibit Lauren fery uh Katherine Reagan and Aisha Prather and um nearly two dozen other Cornell Library staff members who helped to put it together and I want to invite you to join us after uh uh Doug's talk for a reception and exhibition viewing uh immediately following which will be in the Croc Library hland gallery I'd also like to thank our donors uh stevenh e and eving Edwards milman uh this is uh our second exhibition uh funded through the milman family's generosity and we are so grateful for their faith in us and their commitment to telling the stories the libraries collections have to offer this exhibition is composed almost solely from the library's own rare materials the fact that we can rely on our own strength to Stage an exhibition as Broad and Rich and fascinating uh and as eclectic as this one is truly a credit to Cornell's amazingly supportive community of students Scholars alumni staff and to the donors who make it all possible so please join me in welcoming Dr anac to the podium thanks thank you very much thanks an for that very generous introduction um you can hear me in the back right so what I need to know is um when's supper 530 5:30 that's okay um it's it's a real honor and a great pleasure to be giving the reunion Library lecture when I was a student here back back in the 1960s I I used to spend a lot of time in the library I was mostly trying to meet girls and um that was not very successful and the second reason for going was to study and that was also unsuccessful most of the time I would fall asleep an awful lot of the time especially in the Presidential Library that beautiful ad white part over in um in Urus in Urus um um anyway that that so and that's I have warm warm memories of of those days so um okay why is this dog on the on the top slide here anybody recognize the dog it's a hunting dog it's a hunting dog right it's a dog with great Cornell connections this is well this the dog is on a stamp this is a duck stamp these are stamps that are sold uh by the government um and bought by hunters so they can shoot more Ducks we make more ducks and shoot them instead of making chickens and eating them we this is how we keep the the game going and this is a dog that was owned by a man named John Olan who was a very generous benefactor and graduate of this University his name is King Buck he was the most famous Labrador field retriever of the past Century the 1900 to 2000 um and of all the duck stamps there's one produced every year there's only been one that's had any image of an animal except a duck on it and that was John oland's King buck okay so um we're going to talk about hybrids and chimeras of various kinds I tried to have an interesting title that would get a lot of people here and that's that's worked but we'll we'll see we're going to try to do these these things in this in this 20 minutes or half an hour or two hours however long it takes uh little sense of place um hybrid versus Chimera what's the difference we'll do some definitions um then we'll talk about hybrids and chimeras and some icon Cornell animals in preparing for this talk I tried to follow the rules that I learned from Professor Howard Evans who's who's here in the in the audience today I've enjoyed his lectures for many many years and I know that he just makes up stuff most of the time so I've only followed that in half half the stuff I'll tell you is true but I'm not sure which half is which okay so um where are we today anybody recognize this yeah you all wreck this isn't this is a gimme isn't it because some of you were worried that this was going to be a scientific talk I was told that I had to to to throw in some easy stuff for the English Majors who are back okay that sounds like there's a lot of them in the audience that's great anyway there we are down at the at the foot of kuga beautiful kuga lake so here's some images of Cornell and can you identify these buildings how about this one war war more no no Howard no fair anybody anybody who lives here now no fair warm oil how about this one up here down here how about this it's still standing very well done you now that's not fair either I think either no it's not that's the mcclintic shed this is over in the plantations across from the new Visitors Center which is a very beautiful building not as important as the building across the the field from it this is where Barbara mlenuk and George Beetle did their classic um plant breeding work with with corn in the early 1920s for which barbar was awarded the the Nobel Prize um and it it's my introduction to a view of Cornell and that view is that Cornell is a very distinguished University it has an outstanding law school um terrific uh strengths in architecture government history um hotel management a whole range of disciplines that are that are not found in very many universities but um biology is the overriding discipline at Cornell and you know that because there are three entire colleges devoted to biology the medical school Agriculture and life sciences and veterinary medicine and if you want to count cutter medical school there's a fourth so um that's the the uh the lens through which I've seen Cornell it's through this biological lens and um I hope that will um inform some of the things I'll say today so in this perspective um I come from the baker Institute that's where I've been working for 30 years it's a tiny little pimple on the Veterinary College which is part of the greater Cornell it's about 10% of the vet School faculty and we conduct research there it's a it's a research institute mostly on dogs uh but quite a bit on horses and something on other species as well this is where we sit farther above cayuga's Waters than the rest of you all we're up on a place called Snider or Hungerford Hill and uh we're down here somewhere now in veteranary colleges up here and these are the baker Institute grounds it's a it's a very beautiful place and if you haven't visited I hope you'll get a chance on one of your trips back to to Cornell that's enough for that introduction okay so now hybrid versus Chimera what's the difference well a hybrid is a result of of two different organisms different species and the result is a blend of the parent species so I got that one from Howard Evans it's going to be hard to get serious again after that I mean do you really want to be it's after I mean it's 5:00 somewhere we should be having a drink at this time of day um so the most common animal hybrid is the mule and that is is really the it's my favorite animal and it's what I spend most of my time thinking about and working on and you can make a horse with a horse and you get an animal that is like a little horse comes out if you made a horse may horse with a jack donkey you get an animal that looks sort of like a horse and sort of like a donkey but it's really a blend of the two it has long ears like a donkey and a body like a horse and that's called a a mule but the outcome of these crosses depends upon which way you do the cross so if you take a male donkey breed it with a female horse you get an animal that's called a mule but if you do the opposite cross with a stallion mated with a female donkey that animal is called a hin and that's actually a very profound observation that these two animals might be different because they have half their genes from their mother half from their father but they get them in in opposite directions in this inters species cross and we could discuss this for a long time but I'll spare you that and we might come back to it at the end if we have a lot of time but it's really very very interesting um observation and part of part of nature now a chimera is different a chimera is a mixture of two separate organisms with discrete parts of each organism so who's this up here Centaur right in Sagittarius and that's you all know that from mythology even the English Majors would know this that's good answer a few questions here right okay so that's that's it for that you now you now know the difference between a chimera and a hybrid if you didn't know that before you know it now and we'll go over it a little bit more now what's that you welcome to ask questions at any time please I enjoy interruptions um right so um okay we're going to talk about Hy a little bit now and a little bit more about the mule um The Mule has made a number of really important contributions to Scientific thought it was the first genetically engineered animal and there've been mules around for about 2,000 years at least people have been breeding them starting in the Middle East and um it's it's a real ideal animal for a for a for an agriculturalist to breed because The Offspring is sterile so if you breed a mule and sell it to someone who wants to use that mule they can't go off and breed that mule again it's like selling them hybrid corn these days that that's sterile you have to that that farm that that mule breeder can breed sell another one the next year because that fellow who bought that mule can't breed it and it's it's it it Blends the genes of two different species and the outcome is better in many ways than either parental species that that defines the term hybrid Vigor which we all know about and it's it was defined in in in light of the observations made on about mules they're stronger than the donkey and they're more resistant to disease and and and and uh injuries than the horse is and they live for about 40 years whereas the horse lives maybe 30 and the donkey maybe 35 they live longer than each parent species and um have fantastic capabilities for for work they also provided evidence against Aristotle's seed and soil hypothesis and this was the the idea of homunculus that inside the sperm there was a little person and that the female only provided sort of the the seed bed where the where the seed would grow but when you look at a mule you know that it's it's not just like the the seed that came from the from the donkey it's a blend of both parent species so that debunks that old idea about about um seed and soil um and um a lot of the uh ideas that I've learned about about um mules come from this this gentleman is Professor Roger short who was an ad white visiting Professor for several years here he's an Englishman now in Australia and a Veterinary scientist and a really fantastic guy so um and of course mules made great contributions to work and warfare over many many centuries Harry Truman was a great fan of mules they have a fantastic fantastic history and probably not much of a future but some of us still like them now um here are some pictures of some unusual mamalian hybrids so we're still talking about hybrids now like mules um up here we have a a what a what what up no up up the upper right that's aorus yeah or zebron or something it's a it's a it's a horse family crossed with the zebra in this case it was a spotted horse and so you get a very unusual cult color pattern where only the back half of this this hybrid is is striped like a zebra and it's a really beautiful animal that's one kind these two down here are cat family hybrids which are also very unusual this one down here is a any lion tiger and the lion tiger cross is a bit like the mule it's larger than than both the lion and the tiger and very unusual and hard to get I you know there's some old pictures of these on the internet very hard to make them anymore because they're both endangered species but it's a and it's really really very very interesting one and this one is not photoshopped that is a a lion crossed with a leopard really very very interesting phenotype there and down here in the lower left is K which is a camel llama across and that was done by Lulu Skidmore who's another friend of mine who works out in Dubai at the center for Camel reproduction works for shake Muhammad the ruler of Dubai and he has a really big camel Reproduction Center and this was the U this was a fantastic hybrid it was produced by using semen sperm from llamas old uh um New World llamas and inseminating them into female camels like this one now those species have been separated by 20 million years of evolution and there haven't been any other hybrids made across that kind of a gap so this is a very unique animal um the world's newest hybrid and and a really fantastic one to give you an example um of how close horses and donkeys are they've only been separated about 1 to three million years so imagine being separated 20 million years and still being able to cross hybridize that's it's really a fantastic little animal the little Comm so hybrids are are quite a neat so how about these guys uh anybody know what these animals are cish catfish is a catfish a hybrid this is an English major question you can get you can get extra points for this on the quiz how about this if this is a catfish then this might be a oh it's a dog fish it's a dog fish um how about this that's a horse fly got and this is a seahorse and this is what's this one Sea Dragon Sea Dragon excellent there's a beautiful display at the scrips aquarium in in San Diego if you want to see these guys they're fantastic animals um it's interesting that we give these some names that are similar to some of the old mythological names that people would give to to animals and some of them really looked mythological it's just incredible U now you know dogs have a great variation in phenotype that's the way they look and that means you can have some that are really big this is the great Daye all you can see is its legs and a little chihuaha so but but dogs of all breeds are members of the same species that means they can interbreed even though you wouldn't think that they could do that so these days we're making designer dogs by breeding across breed so what do we have here well what's this one and this is a Labrador and you get a what okay and this one Cocker Spaniel and a poodle gets a and this is a it's a bull terrier and this is a it's a shitsu that's right we we'll go on to that now okay um that was a rude one okay some of you guys got that one it was too fast for some but it's okay um now um really this this this is going to sound silly but this is really really important cuttingedge genetics one of the one of the areas I'm really lucky to to I'm I'm blessed to to work in three distinct areas of biology Immunology genetics and reproduction and on the genetic side I get to go to conferences and he about advances in genetics in all species and I was just at one a couple of weeks ago down at the Cold Spring Harbor lab in Long Island and I learned a bit about um what's being known about the the gene the Genome of Neanderthals the genetic makeup of Neanderthals that the uh genome sequencers like led by Sante Pabo who works in Germany has taken tiny little fragments of Neanderthal bones isolated DNA and determine the Genome of the Neanderthal and use that information to um determine using genetic methods how how long ago neanderthals and humans were a single species where the common ancestor was they've also been able to compare um human genomes and ask the question of whether there's any evidence of Neanderthal genes in the human genome and they found that there is and it's and the amount is quite significant upwards of 5 to 7% neanderthals used to live in the neander valley it's you know you could have called it the you know the kuga lake Basin but that's where they lived um and Out of Africa came the modern humans and they the word the the geneticist use is AD mixed they add mixed with the Neanderthals and they all used to live in caves in those days like this came out of Africa had mixed with the Neanderthals this was Neanderthal territory there was another group of of Neanderthal like creatures called the denisovans they lived up here in Siberia and they have a their genome has been sequenced they were distinct from the Neanderthals and um you so you can find in people of European and Asian ancestry evidence of about 7% 5 to 10% of Genome of your genome is common with that of Neanderthals we've been separated from them by for for 30,000 years or so and in the some of the tribes in papaa new guini and those islands out there there's evidence for for for a different kind of genome which is probably the denivan genome and they might have 7% Neanderthal and 5% denisovan so they might be 12 or 15% different from us and in fact the the Africans who came out from Africa have no evidence of any Neanderthal genes in them no evidence of AD mixture so they're the real pure humans Homo sapiens really really interesting and it gives you a lot to think about right th this is Ed marinero we we could test for this now this is the this this this gen this project is sort of the my wife was right project you know I I am a neanderthal okay so that's enough of the of the of the hybrids now we're going to do chimeras which is just as interesting believe me so there were a lot of chimeras in mythology and you're all familiar with these now the history majors and any of those other old guys can really uh pitch in here what was this what's this one called this one is just called the Greek Chimera or Chimera and it's part lion and part snake and part goat and it's quite fanciful here's some others what are we looking at up here Centaur we had him before minur great excellent beautiful perfect boy there must be a lot of history English major types in there you guys got those did great on those things um a lot of really interesting creatures that are chimeras and remember these are these are individuals that have um discrete Parts derived from different species sometimes they're animal animal and sometimes they're Animal Human so where are we headed in terms of chimera biology in in the future well within species within an individ individual species naturally uring chimeras are very rare um but they're sometimes found and one of the classic examples is something called a free Martin and free Martins occur when a dairy usually a dairy cow has twins two two carrying two two embryos two fetuses and um if they're of opposite sex you can get a very um a condition of sterility but what happens in these dairy cattle that are car ing two uh twins is that the they have a common placenta and the blood from one calf can one fetus can go into the other and blood from this fetus can go into this one so you can end up as these can end up as blood chimeras they have they'll have these these two they're nonidentical twins they're not not identical twins they're non-identical so that means they have different genes half from their mother and half from their father and they would have different blood types but if you look at this if if these were born then you could look at this one it would have blood type A but it might have 5% of of the blood type of its Cowin and vice versa and studying these animals led to our um elucidation of the theory of immunological Tolerance which is one of the major breakthroughs in biology over the last um half century so that's this is an example of a naturally occurring Chimera but it's within a species Chimera is between species are extremely extremely rare and they may not exist at all now there is a a very interesting um kind of chimerism that happens in humans and this is It's called fetal maternal chimerism and this work has been pioneered by Dr Lee Nelson who is a a rheumatologist she studies Rheumatic diseases autoimmune diseases at the um university of of Washington in Seattle and um I've met her at several conferences over the years in fact and heard her speak just a couple couple of weeks ago she has been using very very sensitive DNA based techniques to ask whether um a pregnant woman would have evidence of cells from the fetus that she carried in her blood after the baby's born and to ask whether the baby would have evidence of cells that have trafficked from the mother to the fetus while she was pregnant and she finds that this is actually quite common so that this could apply to all of us male or female if we were born of a mother as most of us were I could very well have a small fraction of my blood cells that derive from my mother's blood type and not mine foreign to me and if you are um um a woman who was born of a mother and has had children yourself you can be a triple or quadruple Chimera and have cells from your mother that you got when you were a fetus and cells from your fetuses that crawled into you crawled across the placenta into you while you were pregnant so all of us out here you know I mean you can use the the Royal we we we're really the we're two or three or four different individuals and the consequences of this type of chimerism it's called micro Chism because it's a very tiny fraction of your body is actually somebody else's um the consequences are not really known but there are some very striking and very interesting um associations between autoimmune diseases and chimerism of this type and I'm not going to go into the details of that but it's probably not just incidental it's probably a an important biological phenomenon okay there's a question question question I I hope you really don't mind interrupted no I don't uh if the blood cells are in the body uh after the baby's born do they reproduce in the body I mean how do you maintain that in blood supply over time probably it's probably due to these uh special kinds of cells called stem cells that some kind of stem cells get across but it's really it's it's this is really new a new field of biology and it's not very much as known about it at all but it's probably some kind of stem cell that can keep on replicating okay than you but they can be long lasting you can detect these for 20 30 40 years after you've had a child for example okay okay so um now I said that cross species kimer are very rare these are a couple of examples of sheep goat kimer that were made by um another scientific friend and colleague of mine a veterinarian from originally from Denmark Dr Steen willson who is a just a genius at manipulating small embryos and he would take um an embryo from a goat and an embryo from a sheep and split them both in half and mix them together with one part sheep and one part goat and then he'd transfer them either to a goat or a sheep mother and they would grow up and be born and you'd get an animal that looks mostly like a goat but it has a whole patch of wool over here and over here so this is a true Chimera it has different parts of distinct parts of its body are derived from a different species and these two species are actually quite far apart you know you what we we s would think that sheep and goats are similar because they're small and they're sort of furry but um and they give milk and whatever but in fact you can't breed sheep and goats together that's they're much further apart than hes and donkeys are so it's a big genetic Gap and yet those cells can grow up in that environment and function very very well and the rumor is although I don't know this was ever proved to be true that the males of these can be chimeric in their testes and so you can breed them to a sheep to get a sheep and breed them to a goat and get a goat which is very efficient if you only want to keep one maale around on the property so that's possible that's this was done about 20 years ago in fact um but the the area where chimerism another area where chimerism might be headed in the future is in producing spare parts for us all you know it's harder if anybody here had a transplant that's unusual usually when I ask a group this size there's at least one person that's had one how about a hip replacement I've had one of those myself so that's good um but that's that's not living part um but if you if you do need a transplant there are not as many donors as there are recipients who need transplants and that's because we have these horrible helmet laws for bicycles and motorcycles and stuff and seat Bel laws and things that prevent good fresh roadkill which makes fantastic organ donation material sorry this is a vet speaking it's not an MD lecture it's vet but it's true that's it the the the the the source the the the supply of organs went down when with with traffic safety going going going up so we're trying to engineer animals to provide organs for people and the animal of choice is the pig because it's physiologically most like humans and um there's been quite a about of quite a lot of progress made in genetically modifying pigs so that their tissues are less antigenic they will evoke less of a response uh when transferred to a human and we may well be having livers and kidneys and other organs from genetically modified pigs in within our lifetime that's happening pretty fast so we may well become Chimas of sort okay now we're on to the last part so you guys have been good not too many people have left yet it's great iconic Cornell animals so when you go over to the exhibit today you're going to learn about this Cornel Chimera called the unimal which was developed by Professor Howard Babcock to teach students about agriculture and I'm going to try to do this now if I can see right got it let's go over here go down here and is it g to work why is it mute press the mute button let me stop this wait a minute if I go down here I'm G try right right from here looks like it's got sound I do have the speakers in NOP it's not no sound battery charger no it's it's all up remember I'm old you the young people can help me with this take this and see if this will work now no I need help it's Joe lock the guy who's on the radio here who talks about gardening it's a fantastic little how far up guys all right that one there not trying to move over there there okay here we go there it's up it's already it's up well anyway you should go and you should go and look at this it's really quite interesting and um it's it's made in the 1950s or so or 60s and there's Howard Babcock with the with a little unimal and it's it's it's a it's a fe so he clicks it and it out comes a bottle of milk he clicks it again and out comes a dozen eggs and it's um it's it's really it's really critical you watch this here he goes there it is there's a little something or other you'll click it again and there's the bottle of milk yeah so you know when you see this butter yeah I have to go back now to my show when you see this you're probably already thinking this already the shmoo lcap Shmo some of you people remember the Shmo so what what does the Shmo do what can you what can you get out of the Shmo well it gives milk and eggs and butter or and you don't have to churn the butter if you fry it it tastes like chicken if you broil it it tastes like steak and you know it's just it's just like the perfect animal and it it's it's just it's really one of these guys and you know it's not that you know we're getting close um and I think that was was a really interesting part of the exhibit Okay so um I started out talking about King Buck John olan's dog and uh John um was was the the real um benefactor who started the baker Institute going and there was a very charismatic initial leader James Andrew Baker who was a vet from Cornell who wanted to found a Veterinary Research Institute and he did so in 1950 and it became extraordinarily successful the uh the the vaccines for canine distemper were developed at The Institute in the early 1950s and the effect of That vaccine on the dog population was very similar to the polio vaccine on human population which was developed about the same time it really changed the way dogs live and the reason our dogs are dying of cancer now is because they're living past the age of two they used to die of distemper and uh um canine herpes virus and um infectious hepatitis and and a whole bunch of other um common infectious diseases which were virtually all controlled by measures developed at the baker Institute most recently the K9 parvo virus which is one of these new emergent viruses was discovered by Baker Institute scientists and the vaccine was made within a couple of years that was patented and that was the most successful patented Cornell from the period of 1980 until 2000 it was one of the top two or three in the whole history of the University um we The Institute has become so successful at um controlling infectious diseases of dogs that we started to work on other other kinds of problems like especially genetics and we've had great success in in genetic studies as well um this dog is one of the iconic Cornell dogs she she's Tasha she's sadly she's dead now but she was the DNA donor for the canine genome sequence when people study dog genetics now they use Tasha's sequence and Tasha was owned by Greg akland one of our scientists and this is a little biotech company which was spun off by Greg and his colleagues um from the work that they do to uh identify genes that cause inherited eye diseases of dogs um and that's that's very important in itself and I could talk about that for a long time but there was a real real fantastic um spin-off to human medicine and human disease that I'll that I'd like to mention and this brings up another iconic Cornell dog and this is Lancelot who's a briar and briards have a rare inherited eye disease which is very similar to um a disease in humans called labors congenital amoros and that's a disease in which children who have this are born blind they can't see at all and the dogs are the same way they're born blind and what Gus and Gus agiri and Greg akan and their colleagues did was to uh they identified the gene that was defective in these in this condition and it's and it's similar gene in humans and dogs and they made a a copy of the normal Gene and they injected it into the into the retina the back of the retina because that's where the problem is in the retinal cells of one eye of Lancelot and Lancelot learned to see with that one eye and um he was taken to Washington was on the steps of the capital um increased the budget to the National Eye Institute by 10% just on the basis of this one experiment this was done in the year 2000 and there are already children who were born blind who have been given the same therapy who are no longer legally blind it's the most successful application of gene therapy that's been described yet and it's the fastest um transition time from an experiment to um human human Trials of anything I know for this kind of um this kind of treatment so we also work on horses at U at the baker Institute and this is the the barn where I I keep my my research herd um we've been pushing the envelope of assisted reproduction for a long time at um at at the baker Institute these are some examples of mules sterile hybrids in which we transferred either horse or donkey embryos and allowed those sterile mules to go to term this was done back in the mid 1980s and this is a a horsee that carried a donkey embryo to term this is a completely cross species Embryo transfer this would be similar to to to putting a a chimpanzee embryo into a woman or vice versa um a human embryo into a chimpanzee and it's it really tells us a lot about the strength and um the strength and the power of the mechanisms that are in play during pregnancy to prevent the mother from rejecting her fetus not only will she not reject a fetus of her own species she won't reject a fetus of a closely related species and that's a very interesting topic which I again will not Tire you with um in the baker Institute has has two two iconic animals with respect to genome sequencing this is Twilight who was a one of the horses and I research heard and she was the donor of the DNA for the horse Genome Project so in our one little Institute we have the DNA donors for the dog Genome Project and the horse Genome Project and that's a real feather in the cap for for Cornell now I'm going to close with um my my favorite project at Cornell and it's one I wish I was working on but I'm not this is a the fox domestication project you might have seen this cover of National pornographic a couple of months ago um which featured the Fox on its cover and this is Dr Anna kova who came to Cornell from um from from Russia and she came to study dog eye disease but her secret desire was to work on these these foxes that had been um tamed through a captive breeding program in noo sairin Russia do you all know about that program no a lot of you do some of you do some of you don't so about 50 years ago some really wacko Russian geneticist got together with the fur breeders and said Gee Whiz wouldn't it be nice if you had tame foxes and then we could make fur coats out of we could grow them like we grow foxes like like we grow cattle and sheep they don't have to be wild aggressive foxes so they they they started this program where they would take uh um now I hope I'm going to get some sound here but I I'm afraid I'm not no where's my sound man anything there you don't know what's going on do you I'll try to pull this out and see what happens okay uh can you hear any of that okay so there's a peasant up there on the right I have a lot of those in Russia in Siberia and the peasant would go to this 3x3 cage and there'd be about 50 foxes there and they'd put their hand in and see if the fox is going to bite this is one of the aggressive [Music] ones they don't even wear gloves so that's what you'd expect from a typical wild fox some of the foxes were not so not so um aggressive and they would take the ones that were less aggressive and breed them together and the ones that were more aggressive and breed them together they've did this for less than 50 years only about seven or eight generations and what they got at the end was foxes foxes that are like behave like this it's like a cross between a dog and a cat it's it's the most amazing [Music] thing so I want you to while you're watching this I want you to think how many species of domestic animals do you know about can you name the answer is less than 15 probably less than 10 because cats don't count they're not really [Music] domesticated biologist biologists have thought that it would take um hundreds of years to domesticate a species and it was a very very difficult process with a fox it took less than 50 years this is a blink of an eye and it's just an incredibly magical process that we don't really understand but it's one of the most interesting projects in biology now the good news for the animal rights folks is that this project failed to produce um tame foxes that could be used by the fur trade because in addition to changes in their behavior they also change the way they look and you can see that they have spotted coat colors their ears flop over more their tail grows up this is a little wild you know one of these tame foxes with a little child they um they've developed coat colors which remind you of a spotted cocker spaniel or a a black and white dairy cow or spotted horse and that's when a light bulb goes off that um every species of domestic animal has a at least one breed within it except for the camel where there's a spotted coat color like a pinto you know spotted coat color um and those coat colors are never found in nature you find spots like a cheetah has and and you find Stripes but you never find the patches that you find in uh the domestic species so that those genes that are um the gene that controls tame behavior is probably very close on the chromosomes to the genes that control these these coat colors so that's a really really interesting project and this is this is a study that Dr kova is working on it's funded now by the National Institute of Mental Health and we're trying to find cognate genes that is the genes in the fox which correspond to genes in the human which might influence one's behavior and it could be used in studies of autism and they could test prisoners and you they could do all kinds of things that some good some bad but we'll see how that goes interesting one but anyway that those are fantastic videos so this is this is one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein imagination is more important than knowledge um that's because I have so little of it um um but it's a funny thing I found this in I found I found this back in 2000 in a in in a Horseman's magazine called The Blood Horse which is like the most anti-intellectual publication on Earth published by the Thoroughbred breeders and to have them quoting Albert Einstein it's just amazing they were trying to get people to buy you know seen from very very very high price stallions and if they had any knowledge they would never do it so they had to have a lot of imagination and expect that that their mayor would produce a winner okay so we're going to end here with uh with Twilight and uh and Ezra Cornell himself um and you remember that when Ezra was waving goodbye to ad white uh New York Harbor sending off to to find find the first faculty he said don't forget did you get that let's do that again come onra don't forget the okay right don't forget the wor right thank you Ezra okay so that's it done now um you're you're welcome to to ask questions or go to dinner it's almost dinner time or to don't forget going over to the uh to the exhibit to tour the exhibit um any questions animals is that allation for hybrid animals is it all uh achieved pregnancy is achieved with artificial insemination most of the time but not always some of natural some of it is natural yep but most is artificial insemination you go to Santa you'll find a jackal op Jackalope and S I've seen those out west yeah they're they're that's a kimer all right those are those are good ones I should have had one of those in this I I'll remember that for next time thank you question are wolves and dogs the same species wolves and dogs are not the same species but they're very close and they can interbreed Offspring yes The Offspring are fertile in fact they've just been there's another paper that just come out saying that they've looked at the percentage of wolf and dog and coyote in the Eastern Wolves and the Western wolves and there's there's there's it's a bit like the Neanderthal story there's quite a bit of AD mixture what's the significance of this science with regard to human cloning human cloning uh that's a really good question I'll have to I might what significance with respect to human cloning well um human cloning is not something we talk about very much um and probably we wouldn't wouldn't we we wouldn't do human cloning but if anybody anybody here has ever had identical twins any of the women have identical twins you have there's one Lynn Joya has you know identical twins are clones it's it's not something we haven't had before naturally um and it may just be a matter of time but um I'm not sure we'd want another of most of us it's a major ethical question it is a major ethical question and it leads us to the topic of epigenetics which we haven't talked about today at all and that identical twins really aren't not identical so you wouldn't expect them to be as bad as the original they might be better wasn't there another characteristic of the friendly foxes in the Russian study that they had a a curly tail or ra yes that's right y the Tails did change the in the Russian foxes the tail curve did change as well that's right you had a slide indicated that there was like a 5 to% overlap in the genome ofth certain hum yes and so I'm just wondering there must be different ways of assessing that percentage because I've seen uh claims that the human species shares something like 95 or 98% of the genome with a chimpanzee yes so there must be two multiple ways of assessing this percentage going on here yes that's the question about about U what does it mean to be genetically similar to one species or another or to one individual or another um and that's that's a really very perceptive question it's it's hard to give a clear answer it's um because there are so many different ways of assessing similarity in the genes and um when we say that we're 90 you know 95% similar to chimpanzees or 98% similar you might ask whether do does that mean that we have 22,000 structural genes and 21,000 of them are present in chimpanzees that's one way of saying they're they're 98% identical another way is to say whether the exact string of nucleotides that the DNA code is identical between humans and and a neanderthal ancestor and that's a different way of assessing that so it's um it's a bit like um the federal deficit in debt and and all those kinds of gibberish that the that the economists give us you can get very confused doing it but um but I'd say that from my perspective I I'm I'm happy to believe that we do have 5% Neanderthal Gene Neanderthal DNA there's 5% hold DNA in in humans in some humans and more more in others more in others okay time for the reception or one last question when you talk about the hybrid the or the and horse and Donkey make a mule right donkey does that translate to evenity is just one it's One race um hybrids in different ethnic cultures for example do they produce like a stronger human could we could we associate that or no well I mean we've always thought that that close in breeding is bad so in that sense it does translate you you outbreeding is often good because we all carry a certain number of genetic mutations and in individuals who are closely related to us they probably carry those same kind of mutations and for many of those if you have two copies of that mutation you'll show a genetic disease phenotype you'll you'll you'll you'll express that that disease and if you marry someone from um outside of your genetic group it's it's less likely that they will carry the same set of mutations so you're more likely to be genetically Rob bust so in that sense it does hold I just thought it was interesting if you take a historical Contex let's say um World War II and the Nazi uh kind of uh regime that wanted to perpetuate a uh super OPP external might Gene right no it's it's just the opposite just the opposite is what is what that's that's the that's the fuel for evolution and for and for progression in in uh in in any any species if you if you become very too much homogeneous you can select for a good phenotype but you won't be able to make any more genetic progress you won't be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions in the future because that's those those conditions work on the variation in the DNA and the population okay I think that's it thanks very much again

Channel: Cornell University

Views: 61,606

Keywords: Cornell, animals, myth, reality, humans, genetic engineering, Doug Antczak

Id: 8tKvaZtf9j8

Length: 58min 59sec (3539 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2011