I’m just going to come out and say this:  I love science.  Science is awesome.  I wish like crazy I was good at science, or felt like working hard to make myself into a scientist.  Why?  Sometimes scientists do things not because they should, or because there’s a need to.  At its core, science is all about doing stuff just because you CAN.  Take, for example, the Korean geneticists who randomly decided they wanted to make beagles that can glow in the dark.

Why beagles?  Why glowing in the dark?  The answer to both those questions is simply, “Why not?”

Researcher Byeong-Chun Lee and geneticist Woo Suk Hwang (who cloned the first dog clone in 2005) created Ruppy (short for Ruby Puppy) and her littermates as a way to prove whether or not dogs can be genetically engineered to be better stand-ins for humans in disease and fertility treatment research, among other uses.  Let the conspiracy theories begin.

How long do you think it’ll be before fluorescent puppies hit the pet market?  Maybe not in a few months, or even a few years, but eventually someone out there will have a Ruppy of their very own.  Who wouldn’t want a pet that doubles as a blacklight poster?

Tags: science, weird science, genetics, Ruppy, fluorescent puppies, world’s first transgenic dog, unusual experiments, Woo Suk Hwang, Byeong-Chun Lee

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