US man, 81, sentenced to six months for creating giant hybrid sheep for hunting
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I am unsure whether I believe that this was an actual cloning, and not just some sort of old-fashioned hybridization or something. Because this guy should be awarded a science medal instead. What really is the legal issue with creating your own mammals just to be held captive and hunted for food?
It seems weird, but unsurprising, they'd throw the book at him, and make an example of him, lest someone else strike out on their own with such a complex biomedical challenge!
It's pretty straightforward: you take an egg cell, suck out its genome and replace it with a new one. Then you implant that egg in a host and it is gestated and born in the usual way. The tricky part back then was extracting the from adult cell samples, but modern genomics is way past that. It's pretty much the same process as creating a new bacterium, which is done quite commonly as I understand.
Totally easy. In fact, I usually do it by accident 2-3 times a week, while fixing breakfast. Please don't inform the FBI.
Better explaination of actual charges.
Would this cross-breeding be legal if conducted on a remote island with limited dangers of the introduced species to wildlife?
Looks like the main charges are due to violating the Lacey Act multiple times - shipping the hybrid sheep domestically while labelling them as "pure" sheep, while also conspiring to import embryos/sperm of the Marco Polo Goat (central asian) goat, also illegal without permits/procedures.
If the guy was younger, I'd assume he'd be getting at least football numbers in prison given how long the business was running, etc.
> The US district court judge Brian Morris said […] he weighed Schubarth’s age
I really hope this guy wins his appeal, or at least gets his sentence commuted. What a farce.
Lol
Why does this judge feel entitled to be the arbiter of the genetic makeup of creatures on Earth?
> They are protected under international convention as a threatened species and outlawed for import into Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.
These are reasonable concerns, you generally shouldn't move plants or animals across international (or U.S. state) boundaries, but the if the species is threatened then wouldn't people breeding more of them be a good thing? This seems like a weird case where I think it's illegal under the Lacey Act because they're endangered but by importing them he's making them less endangered.
This article seems outraged about this calling it an "audacious scheme" (as opposed to a technicality) while Humans have been breeding sheep for size and other characteristics for thousands of years.