Cloning Companions
Pets are wonderful, but cloning them is a really bad idea. It’s cruel to animals, preys on the emotions of grieving humans, and unduly normalizes an unhealthy and potentially dangerous approach to the world around us. The recent announcement of the latest cloned dog — complete with manipulative publicity — makes this a good time to review the issue, and provide an introduction for anyone who is unfamiliar with the details. The idea of cloning pets has been around literally since the 1997 announcement of the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep. John Sperling , who made his fortune out of the University of Pheonix, was reading about Dolly when he whimsically wondered if it would be possible to clone his girlfriend’s dog, Missy. For a billionaire, the next move was easy: He delegated the project to his girlfriend’s son, Lou Hawthorne, and paid a research team at Texas A&M to do the scientific work. Several million dollars later, they had failed — but they did manage to clone a cat. Hawthorne ran with the idea, and set up a company in California’s Marin County with the cute name of Genetic Savings and Clone (GSC), where pet owners could bank DNA and (hopefully, eventually) commission a cloned pet. GSC eventually went bust, but Hawthorne persisted with this and related ventures under a variety of names. He’s now offering pet-cloning services through Encore Pet Science , a subsidiary of a company intended to provide genetic testing services in China . The current price for a cloned dog is $138,500 plus sales tax and shipping. Encore has competition, notably from RNL Bio , a Korean company; a lawsuit is in process over RNLBio’s allegedly unlicensed use of the Dolly technique , whose patent is owned by yet another company set up by Sperling. Korea is the center of pet cloning: Hawthorne’s scientific partner is Hwang Woo-Suk , who became famous for cloning human embryos for stem cells and then notorious when it turned out he had faked the work, misappropriated money and broken laws about obtaining human eggs — but whose animal-cloning expertise is real. Highlighting the absurdity of the people involved in pet cloning is easy (my colleagues and I have done so here and here and here ) but there are serious questions involved. A few dogs have now been cloned, as well as a few household cats. The commercial efforts are generally not the subject of scientific papers but the success rate is indisputably small. That means lots of suffering by animals, both the clones and the females who are impregnated with them. According to a 2008 peer-reviewed survey, only 1 of all cloned embryos transferred into surrogate mothers develop into viable offspring. Moreover, clones that are born, and survive, are probably not entirely healthy . Another important note is that clones, even if apparently healthy and somewhat similar to their progenitors, are by no means identical to them. Says Robert Lanza , who has cloned several species: “Anyone who thinks they might be able to get Spot or Fluffy back is mistaken. Cloned animals have distinct personalities, just like identical twins. We cloned a herd of cattle several years ago — they were all cloned from a single individual. Yet they developed a social-dominance hierarchy just like a herd of ordinary dairy cows. The cloned animals exhibit the full spectrum of behavioral traits, from curious and inquisitive to timid and shy. There’s no doubt about it: each cloned animal has its own unique, individual personality.” Families who lose their pets, or begin to anticipate this loss as the pets grow older, are understandably upset. Dogs and cats make great companions , and this can actually have health benefits for people. But grief can take people over a fuzzy line, and denial is a common first reaction. Those who exploit other people’s grief, reinforcing their denial by insisting that they can replace a once-loved companion, are treating serious issues frivolously, for their own profit. The public is not rushing to use these services; most people have too much sense (and not enough money). Even Hawthorne has admitted that pet cloning is not yet a paying proposition . So the back-up justification is that developing the technology will in some way benefit research into human diseases . This sounds suspiciously like an attempt to justify what you already want to do for other reasons. My guess is that the mindset involved is about control: controlling nature (viewed as something separate from ourselves), and in our homes, the desire to define and control our pets the way we choose our wallpaper or color scheme. There is also a wider context. Sperling was not, in the medium term, primarily focused on cloning a dog. He had ambitions to prolong human life indefinitely , and perhaps for creating “post-humans,” but as a practical matter he, like Lanza, became involved in cloned livestock . The FDA has now permitted, at least in principle, the sale of meat from cloned cows, despite the uncertainties involved in the process, including what many see as health risks to people who eat them. All this is part of a trend toward turning natural products into patentable commodities. It’s clearly related to the activities of seed companies who are selling patented, genetically modified seeds (which so far benefit the seller much more than the farmer, let alone the consumer). It is also related to the concept of ” improving ” people. Given recent findings about the complications of the genome , that may not be possible, but the fantasy seems to have great appeal to a small minority. Cloning pets is a way to make these dangerous concepts seem acceptable. Fortunately, so far, public opinion is firmly against them , but the U.S. — unlike most advanced nations — does not even have a legal prohibition on cloning people , and has no adequate mechanism for preventing experimentation on modifying our children either. Banning pet cloning would be a useful start. Exclude From Most Popular:
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