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."

Comments

More money than brains I guess

[grub]

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.

Re:More money than brains I guess

[rjstanford]

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.

Yeah, they could. Of course, people who loved animals could take the $3000 they spent on a new computer to replace their barely-a-year-old computer and donate it to a pet shelter as well. People spend money. The vast majority of it goes to things that other people think are "wasteful," at least in this country. The only thing that changes is the perspective.

As to the wisdom of spending $50k on a cat - any cat - I'd say that it depends a lot on your overall financial picture.

And as for cloning, well, that's another debate entirely. Two debates actually, one on the ethics of it and another one on the effectiveness. Ah, joy.

Re:More money than brains I guess

[Richie1984]

Sure, it's natural to want to end personal suffering but the wait for the new animal and the eventual letdown of it not being identical to the clonee can't be healthy either.

Exactly. Having Pet Dog V2 running around would just be a constant reminder of V1. Your pet dies, you deal with it. I have lots of pet dogs and it never ever ever gets easier, but death is an important part of life.

Re:More money than brains I guess

[Dr. Evil]

...the $50K (or less) would be better used...

The odd thing about money is that it follows a conservation principle... it's never destroyed, it just changes form.

$50k was just liberated from somebody who didn't need it. Half of it went into taxes (on the operation, the materials for the operation, the salaries for the employees etc), the other half was distributed among those who performed the operation.

You could argue that it was a $50k investment towards the practitioners of vetrenary science, which I'm sure bennefits the rest of society somehow.

I have no problem with wealthy people spending money on frivilous things. It does bug me though when they spend it on things which hurt everyone else... like gas-guzzling cars, old growth wood, clothes made from slave labour, stuff like that.

IMHO, the greater harm was done just by creating another cat rather than saving one from a shelter... the $50k is better liberated regardless of how or why... and the harm done isn't that big a deal.

Mortality

[plover]

It's weird that people have become so "undisciplined" that they can't accept death at the end of life. It lives, it breathes, it loves, but eventually it dies. All pets do, all people do. Does it hurt? Of course it does, I've cried so hard at the loss of a pet that I thought I'd never want another out of fear of the pain of the loss in the future. But it hasn't stopped me from getting other pets.

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? ...

Re:Mortality

[yndrd1984]

I see this as only catering to the clinically insane. The rich, clinically insane, but insane nonetheless.

Yeah, people that buy weird things must be insane. /sarcasm

Oh, well, I suppose if there's cash to be made, why not make it?

"Why not indeed!?!" -Bender /humorous quotes

1. Is this stupider than feeding the original cat caviar three meals a day? It's their money.
2. "Diciplined" people accept death? I never thought of 'diciplined' and 'wussy' as synonyms.
3. When vets/genetic researchers/Jurassic Park people use this type of technology to do something good/useful (OK, scratch the JP people), and it's easier/cheaper to do since the businesses already exist, what will you say then?

Also, this may not be perfect, but why not annoy the Grim Reaper a little, right? :)

Yndrd1984

Re:Looking forward to the spinoff technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

The customers of these guys are funding our future. Before criticizing them, consider, they're giving us

• 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.