Snuppy

Sure the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 was a big deal. But let's be honest, a sheep has nothing on a puppy. So when scientists at Seoul National University introduced to the world history's first cloned dog in 2005, a floppy Afghan hound pup named Snuppy (after the university), we were quickly besotted....[More]

Snuppy

Sure the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 was a big deal. But let's be honest, a sheep has nothing on a puppy. So when scientists at Seoul National University introduced to the world history's first cloned dog in 2005, a floppy Afghan hound pup named Snuppy (after the university), we were quickly besotted. Far more than a dog, Snuppy was, according to TIME, the "most amazing invention of 2005."

It was no small feat. The scientific breakthrough, led by biomedical scientist Woo Suk Hwang (who was later dismissed from the university for fabricating data on cloning human stem cells), was as laborious as Snuppy was adorable. Snuppy the puppy marked the single success out of 123 attempts spanning three years. Since then the gangly puppy has sired nine puppies of his own with two cloned females, marking the first successful breeding between clones.

Snuppy is shown here with the three-year-old male Afghan hound whose somatic skin cells were used to clone him.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Pavlov's Dog

By today's standards, Ivan Pavlov's experiments on dogs would make him the canine equivalent of Dr. Kevorkian, but in 1904 the Russian physiologist was celebrated with a Nobel Prize for unmasking the inner workings of the digestive system (for example, he would implant tubes into dogs' stomachs to study gastric secretions), which previously had been a mystery to scientists....[More]

Pavlov's Dog

By today's standards, Ivan Pavlov's experiments on dogs would make him the canine equivalent of Dr. Kevorkian, but in 1904 the Russian physiologist was celebrated with a Nobel Prize for unmasking the inner workings of the digestive system (for example, he would implant tubes into dogs' stomachs to study gastric secretions), which previously had been a mystery to scientists.

This path of discovery in turn led him to uncover that basic tenet of psychology—classical conditioning, which at its most harmless made dogs drool in anticipation of chow at the sound of a bell and at its worst made an innocent boy named Little Albert deathly afraid of white fluffy things.

Pavlov's discovery opened up a whole avenue of cognitive science and provided researchers with a basic understanding for how animals learn. All this from some drooling dogs intent on getting their dinner, which it should be noted was an unappetizing dish Pavlov referred to as "meat powder".

There were in fact a number of Pavlov's dogs. Here is one of them, stuffed and on display at the I. P. Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia. That tube hanging out of the corner of its mouth was surgically implanted to measure salivation.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Shadow

Craig Venter had a dog—in fact, he had three. He also had a penchant for racing to sequence the genomes of organisms. Which is how on September 26, 2003, The Institute for Genome Research (now known as the J....[More]

Shadow

Craig Venter had a dog—in fact, he had three. He also had a penchant for racing to sequence the genomes of organisms. Which is how on September 26, 2003, The Institute for Genome Research (now known as the J. Craig Venter Institute) and The Center for the Advancement of Genomics jointly published a 1.5x whole-genome sequence of the domestic dog in Science.

Now the dog that had its genome scanned wasn't just any dog. It was one of Venter's, a black male standard poodle named Shadow. And since poodles are widely acknowledged for their top ranking in canine IQ, in addition to being bred for swimming and hunting, Shadow seemed as good a candidate as any for the job.

At the time, the dog was the closest relative to humans to have a near-complete draft genome sequence published, thereby opening the door to the possibilities of further understanding human (and canine) genetic diseases and behavior. (There are at least 350 genetic diseases in dogs with human counterparts.)

Shadow will go down in the pages of genomic history as the first dog to have his genome scanned. Shadow passed away at age 14 in 2008, but here he is obediently posing at the sequencing center at The Institute for Genomic Research.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Tasha

By the time Shadow's draft genome was in press at Science, scientists at the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute were holding auditions to find the best dog for the job of having its entire genome sequenced....[More]

Tasha

By the time Shadow's draft genome was in press at Science, scientists at the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute were holding auditions to find the best dog for the job of having its entire genome sequenced. They considered 120 different dogs from 60 breeds before deciding on Tasha, a female boxer that lives in New York State.

What made Tasha so special was that her genome had the least amount of variation, key to speeding up the sequencing process. Two years later Tasha's genome was published in the December 8, 2005, issue of Nature, heralding the arrival of dog genomics.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Marjorie on the roof being fed

Before the discovery of insulin in 1921 diabetics suffered an inexorable demise. Enter Fred Banting, a broke Ontario doctor, and his student helper Charles Best....[More]

Marjorie on the roof being fed

Before the discovery of insulin in 1921 diabetics suffered an inexorable demise. Enter Fred Banting, a broke Ontario doctor, and his student helper Charles Best. The pair spent the summer of 1921 toiling in a lab at the University of Toronto in search of an antidiabetic pancreatic extract.

The experiments were simple—and a bit gruesome: They removed the pancreas from dogs to turn them diabetic. Then they extracted fluid from the islets of Langerhans (insulin-producing cells) of healthy dogs and injected them into the diabetic dogs. Lo and behold, the dogs' diabetic condition was alleviated. One in particular, a pet of the lab named Marjorie, also known as "Dog 33" in Banting's notes, survived particularly well as a diabetic.

Within half a year of their discovery, a diabetic teen in Toronto received the first documented human injection of insulin on January 23, 1922. Five days later Marjorie, just one of the many dogs instrumental in the discovery of a cure for diabetes, was chloroformed. She had lived as a diabetic on pancreatic extract injections for 70 days.

Marjorie seemed to have a particular impression on the lab. Here she is being fed on the rooftop of the University of Toronto medical building in which Banting and Best conducted their research.
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Polly

Charles Darwin, the grandfather of evolution and dog owner many times over, was a keen observer of his four-legged friends and how they related to his academic pursuits....[More]

Polly

Charles Darwin, the grandfather of evolution and dog owner many times over, was a keen observer of his four-legged friends and how they related to his academic pursuits.

"His little dog Polly was quite a favorite of his," says Janet Browne, a historian of science at Harvard University and author of several works about Charles Darwin including a two-volume biography. "He thought she was a clever little thing."

Polly, a rough-haired fox terrier that originally belonged to Darwin's daughter Henrietta, is memorialized in Darwin's last book, The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals in Figure 4: "Small dog watching a cat on a table". Indeed her basket rests by the fireplace in his study and she was always to be found by his side, according to his other daughter Emma. No doubt, Polly was Darwin's escort as he strolled along the Sandwalk at Down House, a garden pathway that he built specifically to aid his outdoor cogitation and rumination. In fact, Polly's place in the Darwin household was so fixed that Thomas Huxley (referred to as "Darwin's Bulldog" for the tenacity with which he defended Darwin's theories in London) made a cheeky cartoon of Polly's own evolutionary tree.

Polly came last in a long line of pet dogs that provided Darwin with insights into his scientific pursuits, Browne says. In one instance for example, Darwin writes of how humans and animals all belong to the same spectrum of life, given that dogs clearly dream.

In another instance he and a geologist Charles Lyell correspond over how the credibility of Darwin's theory rests in part on his ability to explain the immense array of phenotypes seen in dogs, something he does attempt to do in chapter 1 of Origin of Species, "Variation Under Domestication": "So the dogs were simultaneously much loved pets and also supplied Darwin with interesting observations."  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Melanoma dog

If history didn't back it up, the first reported case of a dog sniffing out cancer might have been dismissed as a tasteless April Fools' joke.

Two London dermatologists wrote a short letter titled, "Sniffer Dogs in the Melanoma Clinic?" in the April 1, 1989, issue of The Lancet....[More]

Melanoma dog

If history didn't back it up, the first reported case of a dog sniffing out cancer might have been dismissed as a tasteless April Fools' joke.

Two London dermatologists wrote a short letter titled, "Sniffer Dogs in the Melanoma Clinic?" in the April 1, 1989, issue of The Lancet. What followed was an outlandish tale involving a female border collie–Doberman cross that obsessively sniffed a mole on her owner's leg each day (for several minutes at a stretch through her trousers). The dog kept this up for several months until one day, when the patient was wearing shorts, it went in for a bite. The patient's next stop was the doctor's office. Sure enough the lesion was a malignant melanoma. "This dog may have saved her owner's life by prompting her to seek treatment when the lesion was still at a thin and curable stage," the doctors wrote in The Lancet.

Since then the idea that dogs can detect the early stages of cancer has gained traction in peer-reviewed literature. One study published in the British Medical Journal reported that dogs could be trained to detect bladder cancer. In another trained dogs successfully detected patients with lung or breast cancer based on breath samples.

Then, of course, there are those heartwarming anecdotes. Like Parker, a Labrador that became fixated with a scabby rash on his 66-year-old owner's leg (it was a basal cell carcinoma). Or Kaspar, the Australian saluki who hounded his owner's armpit until she got it checked out (it was early-stage lymph node cancer). Whereas that nameless border collie–Doberman cross back in 1989 might have been the first such dog to sniff out human cancer, it is by no means the last.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Laika

Laika, which means barker in Russian, had the honor of being the very first dog in orbit—nay, the very first Earthling in orbit.* Who would have thought a stray from the streets of Moscow would get so far?...[More]

Laika

Laika, which means barker in Russian, had the honor of being the very first dog in orbit—nay, the very first Earthling in orbit.* Who would have thought a stray from the streets of Moscow would get so far?

And yet the tragic fate of the communist space dog (nicknamed "Muttnik" by the U.S. press) easily eclipsed the technical achievement of the Soviet Union's Sputnik 2 mission that sent Laika into orbit November 3, 1957.

She didn't last long. On her fourth orbit, between five to seven hours into the flight, her life signs flatlined; she had expired from heat exhaustion and stress. Nevertheless, the one-way mission—she was always intended to die, just not so soon—proved that animals could survive the unknown effects of microgravity as well as marked a milestone in human spaceflight.

"She's an emblem of 'scientific advancement' that sparked a worldwide emotional reaction, one that continues to this day," says Nick Abadzis, who wrote and illustrated the graphic novel Laika about the space-bound stray.

Laika's space capsule-become-coffin burned up reentering Earth's atmosphere on April 4, 1958. Fifty years later a monument was erected in her honor in Moscow.

*Correction (6/7/10): This sentence was edited after publication to correct an error.  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Labs on Ice

Without his canine helpers Arctic marine biologist Brendan Kelly's work would be lost, maybe even literally. That's because Kelly's research subjects, ringed seals, live under the sea ice during winter, surfacing to breathe in air pockets under the snowdrift....[More]

Labs on Ice

Without his canine helpers Arctic marine biologist Brendan Kelly's work would be lost, maybe even literally. That's because Kelly's research subjects, ringed seals, live under the sea ice during winter, surfacing to breathe in air pockets under the snowdrift. For all intents and purposes, they're invisible.

"For our studies of ringed seals we really depend on the dog's nose to find the seals," explains Kelly, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks's International Arctic Research Center. "And we've learned quite a lot about ringed seal behavior and ecology in the icebound season as a result." Kelly has trained 12 Labrador retrievers so far to sniff out the seals. He refers to them as the "Labs on Ice". This week, he's taking lucky number 13, his one-year-old yellow Lab named Cannon, into the field for the first time.

The idea of recruiting Labradors as field assistants was inspired by traditional Inuit hunting methods in the Canadian Arctic. "For a long time the Inuit used their sled dogs to find seal holes," Kelly explains. "Instead of using sled dogs, we use Lab retrievers."

So what do the Labs bring to the table? Kelly doesn't hesitate: "They have noses. And what's called a nose on a dog is a very, very sensitive instrument."  [Less] [Link to this slide]

Goyet Dog

This unassuming dog skull was collected from the Goyet Cave in Belgium in the 1860s, but its significance didn't come to light until nearly 150 years later when radiocarbon dated it at 31,700 years old, making it the world's oldest dog....[More]

Goyet Dog

This unassuming dog skull was collected from the Goyet Cave in Belgium in the 1860s, but its significance didn't come to light until nearly 150 years later when radiocarbon dated it at 31,700 years old, making it the world's oldest dog. And it remains so by a long shot: Next in line are 14,000-year-old dog remains from Russia's central plain.

"I kind of expected that it would be between 12,000 to 14,000 years old, like the other Paleolithic dogs," recounts Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences museum in Brussels, who led the research. "It was really a big surprise to us that this skull was so old."

Preliminary research suggests that this toothy canine fed on horse and reindeer. The skull's wide braincase coupled with a short, wide snout, are hallmarks of prehistoric dogs. Germonpré likens the Goyet dog to that of a German shepherd in terms of size, but with the head of a husky. "It had all the characteristics of a primitive dog," she says. "It's an indication that people started to domesticate animals much much sooner than everybody thought before."  [Less] [Link to this slide]