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Re-Pet a Reality
tigerdarklord writes "The Sci-Fi concept of pet cloning has become a commercial venture. Genetic Savings & Clone now not only offers genebanking for your pet (alive or recently dead), but a full service cloning shop. Although they started by producing two clones of the CEO's cat, they have now produced their first commercial clone for a woman from Texas. GSC has modified their cloning procedure to overcome the resemblance issues demonstrated when the College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M, created CopyCat. The technology looks promising but the $50,000 price tag will prove to place the service out of the reach of most pet owners."
The technology looks promising but the $50,000 price tag will prove to place the service out of the reach of most pet owners.
... and they get a pet that looks like their deceased pet yet isn't. "Mittens 2.0 scratches my furniture, Mittens 1.0 didn't."
If these people really loved animals and would quit trying to relive the past with a facsimile-pet the $50K (or less) would be better used if donated to a pet shelter for food and sterilization programs. And while they're there they could take home an animal currently on death row.
Trolling is a art,
didnt the lady say that everything about this cat is exactly alike? i imagine as time goes on and as the kitten grows to an adult(assuming the kitten lives that long) then some things will start happening that didnt happen before. i agree with one of the comments that for $50,000 she could have saved a lot of cats from being put to death, but rather found loving caring homes.
These people are not and never will be ressurecting their loved dead pets. The pet that you loved is DEAD. Go save some pet that is actually still alive and save it from being gassed.
This whole experiment should solve the nature-vs-nurture controversy.
Identical twins have existed throughout history, and yet the controversy still persists. This is hardly likely to provide any conclusive evidence.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Anyway, this is still a clone -- it's a different "instance" of the original animal (even if it's made via a copy constructor.) It won't have "genetic memory" of its new owner, it will be a completely different pet. Why spend $50,000? Why not spend $100 at the pound, or a few hundred from a quality breeder, or even a "FREE KITTYS" from a farm?
I see this as only catering to the clinically insane. The rich, clinically insane, but insane nonetheless. Oh, well, I suppose if there's cash to be made, why not make it? ...
John
So I wonder how this will effect Dog/Cat shows. What happens when winners start cloning their animals and when every year. Will we start to see rules in competions like this saying that clones may not compete.
And continue the thought, what happens then when we start cloning ourselves and we have 6 Micheal Jordons playing against 6 Larry Birds? Doesn't each clone have the right as an individual to play if they want? Should rules about clones apply or not?
I wasn't talking about the wasteful spending. That's none of my business. I am talking about bringing another cat with so much fuss and expense into the world when there are so many unwanted pets in shelters. That's wasteful and a damn shame.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
- safe and affordable organ transplants from our own cloned tissue
- endangered species returning.
- extinct species returning.
- opportunities for better cheap foods
- ultimately contributing to our immortality
Getting cloning out of the hands of a few drug companies who want to profit from the rest of the world's ignorance will create industries and opportunities we can't even imagine today.Once the price falls from $50000 to $50, and they clone organs of humans, medicine will never be the same.
its fair to mod this funny but do keep in mind that your PTO grants patents on plants. In particular, plant species newly discovered or produced for the first time by some form of hybridization...so what, other than religous dogma, would keep them from granting patents on strains of cat or dog? The notion of proprietary interest in a particular compliment of genes is established in law and the way breeders try to make money off dogs, cats, goldfish and, of course, race horses pretty well establishes the monitary motivation for those proprietary interests in genetic "Intellectual Property"...go ahead and laugh...That's what many do when they should be scared.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
"Looks promising", eh?
No, just another example flagrant consumption -- commodity fetishism at its worst. Even life has a price for those who can afford it. As other have pointed out, $50,000 could have helped relieve a lot of suffering for people and animals alike.
Looked at another way, its just another example of our society's pathological fear of death. The Egyptians also had an major death fear/fetish and they even mumified their pet cats once in a while -- but at least they buried them!
And American soldiers are dying by the score to help preserve that way of life. Another sad day for the planet.
Is this sig nificant?
You're missing a few very vital points.
Your advice assumes the following:
The pet owner actually had their pet as a companion, instead of as a status symbol.
The dead pet isn't a purebred that already costs close to $50k
A cloned pet won't become the SUV like status symbol of the next decade.
Said Pet owner actually loves animals instead of using them as accessories.
People understand that memories and training are NOT part of what's cloned.
People understand that any similarity in behavior between the clone and the original pet is coincidental
People have brains.
People care about shelter animals.
Now, I can understand making these assumptions. You sound like the kind of person where these assumptions apply. You clearly care about animals and want to see them cared for and happy. Good for you. I applaud you and your intentions.
Just remember, there is most likely enough wealthy people who do NOT meet the above assumptions to make cloning pets a profitable venture.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
A better question to ask is how delusional the client is.
Look, my partner I have a cat (or maybe vice-versa). We're damned fond of her, and we like to pretend we understand her, but we're both smart enough to know that our perception of her personality is massively garbled by the fact that we're human and she's not. There is no friggin' way that this woman's claim that Little Nicky's personality is "identical" to Nicky's is anything other than wishful thinking.
Our cat is dying. When she's dead, we'll miss her, but she will be dead. Even if $50,000 was pocket change to us, we wouldn't clone her because it'd be a really shallow way to treat our memories of her.
I am not all opposed to researching cloning, but I find the ethics of the lady who paid to get her tomcat cloned rather appalling.
The cloned pet will probably suffer from health problems like infamous Dolly did.
On the other hand how many animals could have been saved if this lady would have gotten another cat at her local pound and donated the $50000 to it?
It is hard for me to think of anything else more egoistical than subjecting your next pet to physical suffering just because you are too immature to handle the loss.
People who read about cloning don't realize that the cloned cells have shortened telomeres.
I would have thought that people who read about cloning would actually be more likely to know about this than people who don't.
Don't they say in that movie "Death becomes her" that at the very end of the movie at Dr. Ernest Menville's death, the narrator that he lives on through his progeny?
I hate that sentement. It's given rise to uncountable generations of children being forced into attempts to live out their parents dreams. I'd find it great if we did live on through our children, but we don't. It'd be even more correct from both a biological, and psychological standpoint to say we live on in surviving siblings. We share much more geneticly with them, and were raised in exactly the same environment. If I took a bullet to the head, it wouldn't give me much comfort to know I had a brother as 'backup' though. Ideas of religious afterlife aside, when you're dead I don't see one living on as anything. You're only living on in the sense that the easter bunny is living on.
Everything will be taken away from you.