The rate of scientific discovery is getting faster and faster, with major discoveries
happening every year, rather than every century.
Mars landings, gravitational waves, cancer treatments, vegan chili con carne, we really
do seem to be able to achieve the unthinkable.
But that’s not to say we do it all on our own.
Since the dawn of civilization, animals have been more than just our faithful companions
and our delicious lunch; they have been a vital part of our understanding of how the
world works and often an inspiration for how to make it a better place.
So go give Barkin’ Scorsese an extra cookie, let Meowly Cyrus up on the bed, and together
you can learn about 7 animals who have helped advance science.
Dogs need space, lots of it.
Although the Soviets may have taken this a bit far with the legendary dog Laika, when
they fired her out the atmosphere and made her the first animal to orbit the earth.
Mankind has had a long history of firing animals into the sky, since 1738 when the Montgolfier
brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster up in a hot air balloon.
The sheep was named Montauciel, which means climb-to-the-sky.
They believed a sheep to have roughly similar physiology to a human and the duck and rooster
were control animals, this was science after all.
But also because they thought it was funny to see how a sheep, a duck and rooster get
on together in a spaceship.
This set the standard and by the 1940s, the skies were filled with balloons and rockets
being tested by frogs, fruit flies, fish and monkeys, among many others.
It was like a Disney movie directed by Michael Bay.
Laika was sent into orbit on November 3, 1957, to test how both the g-force of the launch
and micro-gravity would affect a living organism.
Poor Laika just believed that someone had thrown a stick really, really far.
The brave beast died within hours from overheating but there was never any intention of bringing
her home, which many of the scientists say they regretted later on.
If you were ever mugged by a sheep and had to pick one out of a police line-up, you’d
probably struggle.
This may be why the Roslin Institute in the University of Edinburgh, decided to use sheep
as clone subjects; if it didn’t work, they could have just grabbed any other sheep and
said “look, see, they’re just like twins.”
But work it did and Dolly the Sheep was born on 5 July 1996.
She was named Dolly since the original cell was taken from a mammary gland, which made
the team think of Dolly Parton, the famously glandular singer.
Like an extreme episode of the Jeremy Kyle show, Dolly had 3 different mothers; one gave
the egg, one gave the DNA and the final one did the whole pregnancy thing.
Actually I think I watched that episode last week.
Although not the first cloned animal, Dolly was the first clone of an adult, proving that
you could revert an organism back to the embryonic state.
The process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, where you take out the nucleus of
a developing egg cell and put in the nucleus of a developed adult cell; like putting your
grandad in a pair of Converse and skinny jeans and seeing if he fits in at Skrillex concert.
More Red Bull grandpops?
Thanks to Dolly, we may be able to preserve endangered species and even revive extinct
ones by the process she helped to pioneer.
Do you find your goldfish suspicious, always staring at you with those goggly eyes and
gormless expression?
Well, it may be a soviet spy.
We’ve used many different beasts for spying over the centuries; pigeons carrying messages,
dogs that can sniff out weapons and cats that are really good at hacking; well I assume
that’s why they always sit on your keyboard looking suspicious.
Recently, Hamas captured an aquatic spy near the coast of the Gaza Strip, it was a dolphin.
Both Israeli and Palestinian media said that Double O Dolphin was equipped with recording
devices and even an arrow-firing weapon.
It’s thought that he was there to take video of the frogmen training facility, presumably
so they could plan an attack using a ninja octopus and a really angry seahorse.
Dolphin secret agents are not a new thing though; we’ve been using them since the
1960s for a variety of porpoises (purposes).
Both the US and the Soviets had dolphin teams to spot underwater mines and they still do
since their echo location is still far superior to any tech we’ve been able to create so
far.
As far as killing goes, there have been no reported incidents but ex-Navy Seal, Brandon
Webb, talked in his memoir about training dolphins to head-butt enemy targets with a
compressed needle, which could inject lethal bubbles of CO2 into their blood.
Beware the killer spy dolphins.
The Israelis have been accused of having a whole zoo of animal agents, from masterminding
the shark attack in Sharm el Sheikh to a surveillance vulture captured in Saudi Arabia.
I’m looking forward to Bacon Bourne, the swine sleeper agent.
Speaking of porky animals, Ham the Chimp was another great in the story of space exploration.
Ham was born in what was then The French Cameroons but was shipped to the US at a young age to
join the School for Space Chimps at the Holloman Air Force Base in Alamagordo, New Mexico.
This was all part of Project Mercury, the NASA mission to put a human into space.
On the last day of January 1961, Ham was strapped into a nappy and then into a rocket where
he spent 16 minutes being successfully launched up to zero gravity and then coming back down
in his capsule.
He helped NASA gain valuable data about the life support systems they would use soon after
for Alan Shepard, the first American and second human to enter space.
But how did Ham feel about all this?
Famous primate expert Jane Goodall was highly critical of the mission and on reviewing the
footage said that she had never seen a chimp look more terrified.
Sergio Canavero is a maverick surgeon who has been working his way up the animal chain
with the dubious aim of performing a full human head transplant.
Dr. Vladimir Demikhov led a lot of our advancement in the field of transplanting, performing
a lot of different operations in the 40s and 50s and pioneering the use of immuno-suppressants
so that the body would accept the new body part.
And in 1959 he even transplanted a dog’s head onto a new body.
Neurosurgeon, Robert J. White, performed a successful monkey head transplant in 1970
with the animal surviving long enough to see, smell and hear the world around it.
It then decided it didn’t think much of the world around it and proceeded to bite
people.
So it’s undoubtedly possible for humans but the ethical questions it raises are pretty
big; how do you define a person?
Am I only me above the nipples?
Above the neck?
And what if the body I’m transplanted onto has a One Direction tattoo; death would probably
be a better option.
Our final scientific assistant is a wee bionic beast who, like his namesake Oscar Pistorius,
bounces around on blades.
Oscar lost both his back legs in a nasty accident with a combine harvester, down on the channel
island of Jersey.
His owners rejected advice to have him put down and soon they were communicating with
neuro-orthopaedic surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick in the UK and organizing for Oscar to have
specially engineered, honeycomb-shaped implants that would be drilled directly into his remaining
ankle bones.
This technique was designed to mimic how deer antlers grow and allow skin to grow over the
point where the implant joins the body and so prevent infection.
The whole process probably cost about £50,000 but most of that was covered by the pioneering
doctors, rather than the owners and the knowledge they gained has now been used to help humans,
such as a woman injured in the July 2005 London bombings.
So rather than just putting your hamster on a wheel or getting your puppy to play fetch,
maybe try something a little more challenging as your pet may have the key to the cure for
cancer or they could just teach you a really useful shortcut on Microsoft excel.