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Show 1111•••• Monday, Oct. 17, 2011 Page 4 AggieLife Utah State University • Logan, Utah • www.utahstatesman.com ODY55CY Di\ICe,g5 '(KILL BY KARLEE ULRICH staff writer The Odyssey Dance Theatre is bringing the Halloween spirit to USU with its Michael Jackson-inspired production of "Thriller." With dancing zombies and vampires on the hunt, this show has something for everybody said Chyna Smith, a company dancer. "The show is just so entertaining. It's funny," Smith said. "You'll laugh, you'll get scared. It's just two hours of pure entertainment, you'll go through all the emotions." She said "Thriller" appeals to all ages, whether the viewer is a student or senior citizen, because there is such a wide variety of acts. "The show is basically a series of vignettes of your favorite Halloween characters," said Derryl Yeager, the founder and artistic director of the Odyssey Dance Theatre. He said there are acts that will provoke laughs and acts that will spook the audience. Yeager said he started the show 17 years ago after moving to Utah. Back then, when he was preparing to do the company's first performance, he said he was asked if he wanted to cancel the show due to low ticket sales. "I felt that there was something special about what we were creating," he said, regarding why he declined to cancel. Yeager said he he figured if he was going to go down he wanted to go down in flames. Fortunately for Odyssey Dance, Yeager said the firstyear buzz was so high that it's brought back the performance *See JACKSON, Page 6 PERFORMERS FROM ODYSSEY DANCE THEATER PRESENT their annual production of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Since the company started running the show 17 years ago, It has expanded to run six sold-out shows across Utah. "Thriller" will hit the Kent Concert Hall Oct. 18. Statesman file photos ADVS researchers are seeing double BY EVAN MILLSAP staff writer What if you could slice off a succulent piece of prime steak, clone a bull from it, then produce a plethora of delicious dinners? At USU, researchers are able to do just that — kind of. Nuclear transfer research — or cloning — happens all the time in the Biotechnology Center, said Dr. Irina Polejaeva, one of the leading researchers Thinkstock photo and members of the team that cloned the first pigs. USU is one of the most highly recognized universities in the nation for its cloning research, she added. "When I first moved from Russia, I moved to Logan in 1993," Polejaeva said. "I moved away in 1996, but I came back six months ago, because the cloning work that is going on here is very exciting." Before working at Polejaeva worked for PPL Therapeutics, the biotechnology group behind the first cloned mammal: Dolly the sheep. Since Dolly was cloned in 1996, there have been more than 20 species of animals cloned, Polejaeva said. She said researchers have cloned cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, mules, mice, cats, dogs, deer and even water buffalo. Ken White, the department head of animal, dairy and veterinary sciences, said he was the first person to ever clone an equine, a member of the horse family. White said he also cloned three genetically identical mules from one original. "I first became involved here because USU's lab was internationally recognized," White said. Currently, the research team is working on cloning goats, which has never been done at USU, Polejaeva said. Cloning basics Simply put, Polejaeva said, cloning is the ability to produce an animal genetically identical to another. What most people do not know is that the DNA used does not have to be reproductive DNA. A clone could be made from a flake of skin or a pork chop, she said. "One interesting thing we have learned is that an unfertilized egg has a unique cellular environment," White said. "This environment causes the dedifferentiation of DNA. We don't entirely understand it. It's one of the great mysteries and excitements." If DNA is extracted from any part of the body — skin for example — and injected into an egg, the DNA, which has been shut off to allow the cell to specialize as a skin cell, is turned back on, turning the skin cell into an undifferentiated stem cell, White said. "We take eggs from horses, take the genetic material out and put DNA in from the animal we want to clone," Polejaeva said. "Then we allow the embryo to grow for the first couple of days in an incubator, before placing it into a surrogate mother." When creating cloned animals, the team does not always use completely normal DNA, but can put in transgenic DNA, which means the DNA contains genes from another species, Polejaeva said. The altered clones produced can be incredibly important for research, Polejaeva said. For example, in 1999, Louisiana State University cloned Millie, a goat whose milk contained a drug used in coronary bypass surgery. However, the cloning process is far from perfect, White said. "Ninety percent of pregnancies do not go to term," he said. "That's extremely inefficient — much worse than regular births." One of the problems the USU research team is working on is how to keep the cloned embryos from being rejected by the surrogate mother's immune system and miscarrying, White said. The controversy Embryo rejection isn't the only problem the research team has faced. Harassment has been a hurdle as well, White said. "When the first mule was cloned at USU, my name went unlisted. I took the name off my office door and off the university directory, and I still received some pretty crass emails," he said. "There are certain groups of people that think all animal research is bad Other people get fairly angry when you say the word 'stem cell,' but when they learn what's really going on, many of them are supportive." "My opinion is that, in regards to animals, cloning is fine," said Jade Burt, a USU freshman statistics major. "A lot of good comes from it. Human cloning raises enough ethical concerns that I'm against it." White said most people are like Burt — when they learn the incredible potential behind cloning research, the vast majority of people are non-militant. See CLONES, Page 5 |