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Re-Pet a Reality

Posted by michael on from the double-your-pleasure dept.

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."

7 of 482 comments (clear)

  1. This should solve a dilemma by BJZQ8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This whole experiment should solve the nature-vs-nurture controversy. The client claims that the cloned cat has the same personality as its donor...but then again, how closely was this one raised to its predecessor?

  2. Prosecution by maxchaote · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder if this cloning business would eventually result in DNA evidence being inadmissable in court.

  3. But how long will it live? by TrevorB · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OK, cloned cat, nice, but how long will it live?

    People who read about cloning don't realize that the cloned cells have shortened telomeres. The Telomere acts as a cap to protect DNA as its copied. As cells reproduce, the telomere gets shorter and shorter until the DNA isn't protected anymore and you start seeing aging diseases.

    Sure, this cat looks like a kitten, but at a cellular level, it's still an aged cat. It may not have much longer to live than its twin did if it lived out the rest of its natural life.

    This is exactly what happened to Dolly the sheep. Dolly lived to be 6, about half the age of an average sheep.

  4. Re:Looking forward to it! by ikkonoishi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The interesting thing is unless they fixed it age degradation transfers over.

    So if your pet died of old age then the clone will die soon as well because it's DNA is a copy of the old dna with the shortened protein buffers around the edges.

    Sexual reproduction solves this by using the redundancy of the two sets of DNA while simpler creatures such as bacteria don't need the hugely complex dna chains of animals and plants.

    Link for more info.

  5. to all the nay-sayers out there... by dAzED1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    My wife worked for Dr Westhusian and Dr Kraemer at Texas A&M for the Missyplicity Project. They founded Genetics Savings and Clones with a couple others, but have since split with them. She has played with CC (Carbon Copy...NOT "CopyCat"). Dr Kraemer is the one that has CC, and named her, so...its his call. Argue with him.

    My wife actually cultured the cells that they used for CC. All very cool, and all as a 485 class she was doing for her senior honors thesis (in undergrad!).

    ok, now that that is out of the way...

    My wife is interested in conservation medicine (which she will be studying after finishing her DVM). When she began the actual work that yielded CC, I can tell you she wasn't doing it as a horrible person. When we got the cat we have, we picked one that had been taken back to the pound 3 times, and was going to be killed. However...for the proceedure/technology to be perfected, it needs to be *used*. For us to figure out how to mitigate the cloning problems for the purposes of endangered species, we have to have a large test pool - like people's pets. And if people pay for it, helping offset the research cost - all the better. There just isn't enough real money out there available in grants without commericializing it for supplimental income.

    Just a little background for the teeming masses. Not everyone involved in this stuff are terribly people that ignore the rights of cats and dogs in pounds to have happy homes. Quite contrary, really - my wife could have taken her undergrad degrees and made more with them in human applications than she will after she gets her 2 graduate degrees (DVM and PhD). There's no money in it, for the most part. Most of these people (no, not all) have at least some degree of conservation background.

  6. Not just telomeres, but DNA methylation states by scotay · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many epigenetic states are also not reproduced because the cloned DNA doesn't go through the normal sexual process. Genetic imprinting (which parent does the expressed gene come from) is believed to be controlled through DNA methylation. Methylation in cloned cells is seen to be different. There are probably other differences we don't even know about. Limited lifespan is only one problem. Abnormally large offspring (possibly due to over-expression of genes) is one of a number of problems seen in clones. We have much to learn and the quest for cloning will help teach, but clones to date have genetic/epigentic states that have never existed in nature and do not go through the normal checks and balances that sexual selection provides.

  7. Re:More money than brains I guess by FictionPimp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So your saying I need to work at walmart?