A dragon in every home

[Trithemius]

How cool would it be if this actually worked (and I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that it will).


PAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.

GeneDupe's business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.

Link (http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6740040)

[Philosophia]

That would be so cool...

[Garm]

I find these creeps in GeneDupe absolutely repusive.

The first issues raised by these experiments should be the same ones raised by vivisection. Computer models are just that, and the actual aplication is bound to be hit and miss, as their fiasco with the goldfish demonstrates. For every viable aplication of gene splicing like the spider goat there are going to be X numbers of failures like the Beltsville Pig. IOW there are going to be a lot suffering test subjects.

And for what?

Quaint pets?

I'm no fan of PETA and their ilk but this is on par with Mary Kay's clamping rabbits and pouring shampoo in to their eyes simply for the sake of perfecting a no tear hair soap.

[Trithemius]

After doing some digging into this story, I've reached the conclusion that it's just an April Fool's joke. First, there is no San Melito, CA that I can find. Second, Paolo Fril is an anagram of April Fool, and third, GeneDupe?

The "real gold" goldfish story came out on March 30, 2000. The fish was supposed to be available on April 1st. Kind of a dead giveaway in hindsight.

Oh well. It's really making the rounds around the internet and has fooled a lot of people. I've even seen a number of genuine news sites carrying the article.

[Anubis]

my first thought was that it was an april fools joke just because of the timing.. I didn't notice the anagram!

It does bring up an interesting thought though.. lets just suppose.. or pretend.. or whatever words it takes you to go along with this for a minute... lets suppose that this was real.. and in lets say fifty years they had it perfected.. also within that time someone manages to perfect/create time travel (this would make a great sci fi movie btw).. what if they took the dragons, unicorns etc back in time to our past.. to the time when the legends of dragons and unicorns started.. it would make a good reason as to why no bones were ever found... cause they were created in the future and taken to the past.. then brought back to their own time... lol.. ok enough of my scifi fantasy day dreaming.. I now return you to your regularily scheduled programing...