Today is week 13 on my weekly blog and today I am going to be sharing some things I found interesting. Along with that I have also completed the first half of my Shakespeare project and I am now in the middle of creating a second one, I’ll put a little bit about that below. Lets go straight into the weekly post.

Just to get the podcast stuff out of the way here is what’s been going on. So far we have started to design our second post and have even finished recording already. Or topic is all about what makes an adaption so we look at all sorts of examples and decide whether it is a good/bad adaption of the original. Once again I was co-hosting with Matthew and Alex and I thought we had an excellent discussion. We learned a lot from the last time we did a podcast recording, so for this recording we planned even more about what we wanted to say and we also made sure to transition through all of our topics within a certain amount of time. That’s all from the podcast for now but stay tuned for more news in the next weekly post and if you want to check out the latest episode click the podcast at the top of this post.

During our podcast discussion we were talking about adaptions and somehow we got onto the topic of evolution and then Matthew said something that I thought was interesting. He mentioned that in South Korea you clone a dog for $100,000. After some research I found that was a true fact, and it turns out you can also clone dogs in other places such as the U.S.A for around $50,000. According to  Market Watch there has been over 1,085 dogs cloned just by the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, of the 1,085 dogs most common breed cloned were Yorkshire, terriers and Jack Russell terriers.

I thought this was really cool because it was something I had been learning previously in my science class. We learned all about cloning and the ethical issues behind it. We also learned about the CRISPR Cas9 and how it can edit genes very accurately. For those who don’t know what CRISPR does here is a short summary. Basically CRISPR is used by bacteria to remember hostile viruses by cutting small parts of the virus and storing it within itself ( known as CRISPR arrays), so if the virus attacks again the bacteria can easily fight it off. Scientist have been able to attach these bacteria onto unwanted parts of the DNA sequence and cut them out. Afterward researchers insert the customized DNA sequence. 

This has many ethical issues that come with the cloning and DNA editing process when we deal with animals and even humans. The main question that we looked at in science class was is it a violation of human rights as they need to edit a live embryonic cell, and that is technically a living being that might not want its DNA altered. These questions have been around for a long time and I am not sure what the final laws about cloning and DNA editing are.

That is all for this weekly post. I will have a new one next week with even more about how the podcast is going and how it is going to tie into our final project. I thought this weeks topic was cool because it was something I had learned before, so when Matthew started talking about DNA editing, I was able to understand what he meant and add my own ideas on the topic as well.

That’s all for now.