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In 1925, a sled dog named Balto helped carry life-saving medicine through blizzards. A new DNA study reveals what made him so tough.
New York’s Central Park has a statue dedicated to him, and there’s even been a movie about him: a sled dog named Balto. Now he is the focus of a DNA study, 90 years after he died, to see what made the canine so famously tough.
In 1925, this Siberian husky was part of an expedition in Alaska called the serum run, the goal of which was to bring life-saving medicine to young people in the remote town of Nome that were threatened by diphtheria.
The mission in horrendous blizzards conditions involved a series of sled dog teams transporting the anti-toxin relay-style from the city of Anchorage — a more than 600-mile-long trek.
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Though more than 150 dogs in all took part in the record-breaking run, it was Balto who led the final 53-mile stretch, and wound up getting most of the glory. He went on to tour the country, a bona fide celebrity.
After Balto’s death in 1933, his remains were preserved and put on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
“Balto’s fame and the fact that he was taxidermied gave us this cool opportunity 100 years later to see what that population of sled dogs would have looked like genetically and to compare him to modern dogs,” said Katherine Moon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the main author of the study.
It was published Thursday in the journal Science.
Her team took skin samples from the dog’s belly and reconstructed its genome — the complete set of genes in an organism.
They compared this genetic material with that of 680 contemporary dogs from 135 breeds.
Contrary to a legend that held that Balto was half wolf — as suggested in an animated Universal Pictures film that came out in 1995 — this analysis found no evidence he had wolf blood.
It turned out Balto shared ancestors with modern day Siberian Huskies and the sled dogs of Alaska and Greenland.
Moon’s team also compared Balto’s genes with the genomes of 240 other species of mammals as part of an international effort called the Zoonomia Project.
This allowed researchers to determine which DNA fragments were common across all those species and have not therefore changed over the course of millions of years of evolution.
This stability suggests that these stretches of DNA are associated with important functions in the animal, and that mutations there could be dangerous.
The bottom line from the research was that Balto had fewer potentially dangerous mutations than modern breeds of dogs did, suggesting he was healthier.
“Balto had variants in genes related to things like weight, coordination, joint formation and skin thickness, which you would expect for a dog bred to run in that environment,” Moon wrote in a statement.
Bettmann via Getty Images
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Charges against Georgia high school shooter’s dad echo precedent set in historic Crumbley case
(CBS DETROIT) – The father of the 14-year-old accused of killing two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school was charged in connection with the shooting. His charges follow in the wake of the convictions of two Michigan parents after a school shooting carried out by their child.
Colin Gray, 54, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, in the shooting that happened at Apalachee High School Wednesday morning. The 14-year-old suspect was charged with four counts of felony murder.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said the charges come from Colin Gray “knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon.” The father was in court Friday morning, where a judge told him he could face up to 180 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
The father of the shooting suspect being charged comes after the historic case of James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, becoming the first parents in the U.S. to be convicted in a mass school shooting carried out by their child.
James and Jennifer Crumbley were held responsible for their roles in the Oxford High School shooting that killed four students — Justin Shilling, Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre and Hana St. Juliana — and injured seven other people on Nov. 30, 2021.
During their trials, the prosecution argued that the Crumbley parents ignored their son’s mental health needs and purchased the gun that he used in the shooting.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald, the prosecutor in the Crumbley case who set the precedent for prosecuting parents in mass school shootings, reacted to the news that the Georgia suspect’s father was charged in an interview with CNN Thursday.
“My reaction is rage because you know it the prosecution of the Crumbleys was never, ever meant to be a floodgate of charges against parents, because it was such an egregious set of facts,” said McDonald. “I share the emotions of the entire country that, even after that well-publicized case, we’re still here.”
Former federal prosecutor and defense attorney Rick Convertino, appearing on CBS News Detroit to discuss the shooting at Apalachee before it was revealed that the shooter’s father had been charged, noted the differences between the gun laws in Georgia and Michigan and claimed “gun culture” is different in Georgia than it is in Michigan. Georgia passed a law in 2022 that allowed residents to carry without a permit, which means adults do not need to have a permit to buy or carry buy rifles, shotguns or handguns.
One of the most significant differences, according to Convertino, is with the gun storage laws. “In Georgia, there’s no specific child-preventive act that requires the guns to be secured and safe from unrestricted children to have access to it,” said Convertino.
There is also no gun lock law in Georgia or any “red flag” laws that allow for the removal of guns from someone who is determined to be a risk for harming themselves or other people. Georgia’s laws are among the least strict in the nation, according to a CBS News analysis.
“We’ve seen this 14-year-old shooter had made threats a year before. The father apparently said to the police that he bought the AR-style weapon for a Christmas present for his minor child,” Kris Brown, president of gun control advocacy organization Brady, told CBS News’ Natalie Brand, drawing a parallel to the Crumbley case.
Brown said Colin Gray’s arrest and the convictions of James and Jennifer Crumbley send a message.
“If you have a firearm in the home, you better safely store that firearm, or you will have a risk if something happens of being criminally charged,” she said.
Michigan’s new gun safety laws went into effect in February, a little over two years after the Oxford High School shooting.
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