Word: frogged
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...named Pat Powers, Walt Disney agreed to let Powers distribute his cartoons. Mickey Mouse was an instant star, but Disney saw little cash from Powers. From this he learned to trust no one. Walt's invaluable animator, Ub Iwerks, learned less. Powers lured him away to make Flip the Frog cartoons, and Iwerks sold his 20% share in Disney for $2,920. Today that stock would be worth perhaps half a billion dollars...
...doesn't even happen in amphibians, those wondrously regenerative little creatures, some of which can regrow a cut-off limb or tail. Try to grow an organism from a frog cell, and what do you get? You get, to quote biologist Colin Stewart, "embryos rather ignominiously dying (croaking!) around the tadpole stage...
...starfish and other invertebrates can practice asexual reproduction, why can't it be extended to the rest of the animal kingdom? In the 1980s, developmental biologists at what is now Allegheny University of the Health Sciences came tantalizingly close. From the red blood cells of an adult frog, they raised a crop of lively tadpoles. These tadpoles were impressive creatures, remembers University of Minnesota cell biologist Robert McKinnell, who followed the work closely. "They swam and ate and developed beautiful eyes and hind limbs," he says. But then, halfway through metamorphosis, they died...
...efforts on more forgiving embryonic tissue have met with greater success. A simple approach, called embryo twinning (literally splitting embryos in half), is commonly practiced in the cattle industry. Coaxing surrogate cells to accept foreign DNA is a bit trickier. In 1952 researchers in Pennsylvania successfully cloned a live frog from an embryonic cell. Three decades later, researchers were learning to do the same with such mammals as sheep and calves. "What's new," observes University of Wisconsin animal scientist Neal First, "is not cloning mammals. It's cloning mammals from cells that are not embryonic...
...student who asked to be referred to only as "Gabriela" (not her real name) said she would miss her aquatic frog "Toby" if he weren't around...