China Gene Editing Creates Autistic Dogs

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There`s other articles from science publications backing up the claims:

https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/cas_med ... 4736.shtml

Looks like US scientists were involved too:-

https://247newsagency.com/technology/275781.html

It appears they have created autistic monkeys too although this is old news:

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/monke ... ey-traits/

The only thing left to wonder is when will will they sell them to open up the autistic zoo? will the public demand a refund if all the animals hide behind the rock & tree and don't want to cooperate with NT mobile selfies.

Maybe after losing income they`ll bring in the animal ABA

The first link here has the exact same verbiage as your original link. It's just a repost of the original press release.

It even has the words I criticized.

The 1st was a news article the new one was from the research organisation themselves

The language may either be just the way the Chinese look at autism, or more likely someone or machine translated to english, so meaning may be lost in translation

My objections are not because of translation. It's literally the same press release repeated in two places. There is no link to the actual scientific paper, or even the abstract. It's not peer reviewed. I think that basic scientific literacy is very important and sources like this are not valid.

However, I did find the original paper, linked here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37848710/

One thing to note is that their conclusions are not that these dogs are actually autistic, just that they think they've proven that creating "mutant" dogs is a good way to study human brain types and mental disorders.

So aside from the immoral nature of abusing dogs in this way, it's not even clear what they've claimed to have done. They are using CRISPR to edit genes of these poor animals and then using their lowered trust of humans as proof of their supposed "autism" and "anxiety"

This is just junk science, and the fact that it's only being picked up by Chinese tabloids is just further proof of that.

I rarely support animal testing, but in this case it's just completely abhorrent and serves no ethical or medical purpose, and the purpose of this whole study is to prove that dogs make good candidates for further torture.

Sorry, this whole thing just angers me.

Animal testing is a controversial subject that i wont get into.

The reason for multiple links were just proof that this happened like or hate.

Since as some suggested it was just made up tabloid alongside "i married an alien" headline junk.

It WAS made up because the study never claimed to create autistic dogs. It claimed to demonstrate that dogs are good candidates for CRISPR gene editing as a way to test for mental health issues in humans. So the original article completely mischaracterized the purpose of the study, and the results, and the ramifications.

Reading the abstract it sure sounds like they've got dogs that display some pretty characteristic traits associated with autism, created via CRISPR.

One's emotional attachment to the shitbeasts doesn't change whether or not they make a good model.
One's emotional disgust over the nature of the experiment doesn't make their claims less valid.

From just the link you provided it seems like it went way beyond just modelling or whatever they mean by that:



https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37848710/

In layman's terms they created autistic dogs or at least the shank3 version of autism.

I'd imagine that an autistic dog would behave much like a cat.

I'd expect domestic cats to have a higher 'pro-human' drive than a dog with the shank3 mutation.
It wouldn't be surprising if the dog was closer to a wild animal in that regard, rather than like any domesticated animal.

Age old debate which is smarter or more loyal cats or dogs, many claim cats are just interested for as long as you provide for them.

Coincidentally I saw a joke book in the library a while back why cats have Asperger’s

I like both cats and dogs but suspect changes in dog behaviour would be more interesting and noticeable.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Cats-Have- ... C68&sr=8-1

That article leaves a lot of questions. Is a dog even a real animal or just a variety of different creatures created by breeding? How do you define a NT dog? What is the equivalent to people's small talk - wag the tail? Or special interests? This Chinese research project sounds like BS to me.

If the dog has a mutation that's known to produce autism, that seems like a pretty solid reason to assume that the test subject is autistic, just like everything else with that specific mutation.

You can tell the autistic dogs because they get excited when they see trains...

For NT dogs, the equivalent to human NT small talk is when they sniff eachother's asses.

Thats bizarre reasoning.

The whole point of the experiment is that we dont know if said genes, or if any genes, "cause" autism. We know that some genes show up in autistic humans- correlate- sometimes- but not if they cause. So the point of the experiment is to see if those genes cause autism like symptoms in other mammals. And even the genes did cause autism in humans ...they might not in dogs. So thats another variable.