Cloning your beloved pet is easy, but is it right?
Do you want to clone your beloved pet? Singer Barbra Streisand loved her dog Samantha so much that after his death she cloned him and now has two genetically identical descendants, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett. Meanwhile, Simon Cowell has reportedly said he “100 per cent clones” his three Yorkshire terriers.
The first mammal to be cloned was Dolly the sheep in 1996. At the time I was like, “Why a sheep?” I mean, they all look the same anyway. But it was a major breakthrough because mammalian cloning had proven difficult. For a long time, scientists simply could not crack it.
The first cat to be cloned was Little Nicky in 2004, followed a year later by a dog, Snuppy. Would you like your dog to be cloned? No problem – if you can afford 45,000 euros. Cloning your cat is slightly cheaper at €25,000. However, a horse will cost you €70,000.
A clone is an identical copy of its parent. All of the research has to be funded and the money to support Dolly’s cloning came from the UK Department of Agriculture. The thought was that creating a clone through genetic engineering could produce an offspring with useful traits. They might resist infection, limiting the need for antibiotics. Or how about defending against viruses?
After Dolly came pigs, followed by deer, horses, and bulls. However, it is still difficult to do this. Farm animal cloning has yet to yield a “killer app,” a term used in computer technology to describe something of such great value that it guarantees success. Google Maps is a good example. The killer mammalian cloning app could well include pets. There are companies in the US, China and South Korea that can do this. A company in Texas called ViaGen Pets & Equine has said it’s cloning more and more pets every year.
How does it work? As we all know, the normal route to a fertilized egg is for a sperm to insert its DNA into an egg.
The offspring receives part of its DNA from the father via the sperm and part from the mother via the egg. Every time this happens you get a unique individual. Although you share some DNA with your siblings, you have your own DNA since it is random which DNA is from the mother and which is from the father. DNA is the recipe for life, so every recipe in a fertilized egg is slightly different, resulting in non-identical humans.
However, when a clone is made, DNA is taken from part of the animal. In Dolly’s case, it came from the mammary gland, and for that reason Dolly was rather inappropriately named after Dolly Parton. The DNA is placed in an egg that has had its own DNA removed. This egg is then implanted in a surrogate mother’s uterus, and the egg develops into a clone of the animal that donated the DNA. There is no random mixing of DNA, so the recipe is exactly the same as the animal that donated its DNA and produced the clone.
The problem is that although a clone will have identical DNA to the parent, animals are not simply a product of their DNA. Your pet’s personality is also shaped by their environment and therefore cannot be guaranteed. ViaGen has found that 25 percent of a pet’s personality comes from their upbringing.
Animal welfare organizations have raised concerns. Some studies have shown that cloned animals are more susceptible to disease. Dolly died of a lung disease. The success rate is also only about 20 percent, so many surrogates are needed to deliver a viable clone.
Then there was the case of Rainbow, the cloned cat. The result was called CopyCat (or CC), but it turned out that CopyCat’s fur had a different pattern than Rainbow’s. The fur pattern in cats appears to be due to random differences in DNA occurring in the egg after the DNA is inserted. So cloning cats does not guarantee an identical coat, which is certainly one of the purposes of the exercise.
Polo ponies and racing camels are being cloned, and the equestrian industry’s governing body lifted the ban on horse cloning, although cloned horses cannot yet compete. A cloned polo pony sold for $800,000 (€741,000). In the US, the FDA has concluded that “Food from cloned cattle, pigs and goats is just as safe to eat as food from other cattle, pigs or goats”.
The main goal of livestock cloning is to improve the breeding population. Clones with desired traits (e.g. leaner meat) are used to breed with other animals in the usual way, although it has not been disclosed how much meat from cloned animals has been sold. Would you eat beef from a cloned cow?
Perhaps the most justifiable purpose of animal cloning is to protect endangered species or even bring back extinct animals. The only extinct animal that has been cloned is a Pyrenean ibex, but it died of a lung defect. we are far away Jurassic Park and his cloned dinosaurs.
what about people We’ve all seen the apocalyptic sci-fi movies. In the movie moonLed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, a company called Lunar Industries mines helium-3 from the lunar soil to use as a fuel source. However, problems arise because they use human clones for the task. Everything goes horribly wrong when one clone meets another – and they rebel.
Human cloning is theoretically possible. It was done on monkeys, but then came the so-called He Jiankui affair.
A Chinese scientist of that name claimed to have edited the DNA of human embryos using the technology used to clone monkeys. Two babies were born, Lulu and Nana, allegedly engineered to be resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This was convicted, and in 2019, Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison and a $430,000 fine.
Human cloning is illegal given the many ethical concerns. However, pets are fair game. However, if you might not get an identical version of your faithful friend, you might be better off with a new pet from a rescue center. At least you wouldn’t have to ask yourself, “How much does the clone in the window cost?”
Luke O’Neill is Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/cloning-your-beloved-pet-is-easy-but-is-it-right-41581134.html Cloning your beloved pet is easy, but is it right?
