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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."
Welcome our furry overlords!
In all of Ruffy's 14 years, I never could teach her not to piddle on the rug. Now I have a second chance to housetrain her once and for all.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I wonder if they can clone my pet bee so I can have a whole Eric-the-bee instead of my Eric-the-half-bee due to his 'accident'.
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again...
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,
Someone better check with the RIAA to make sure that this does not violate the DMCA.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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?
is a lot of money for the "same" pet to piss all over the carpet.
I'll just go down to the pound and get a pet for $20 to piss all over the carpet, thanks.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
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.
I wonder if this cloning business would eventually result in DNA evidence being inadmissable in court.
I mean, it would be stupid in a science fiction story, but to actually operate under that name has to earn some points.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Let's see if CopyCat can keep up with PlagiarAss technology.
It'll be the same cat. For the same reason that your girlfriend is turning into her mother.
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
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.
Why do you think the first thing the Scottish scientist cloned was a sheep?
A girrrrllllll sheep...
This is going to be the best prom EVER!
John
- 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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
"Why do you think the first thing the Scottish scientist cloned was a sheep?" ...look, it's the Welsh, not the Scots...the Welsh! :)
Go on! Mod me flamebait!
If this is the case then that kitten you had cloned from your aging cat will start costing a lot in vet bills and will die at an early age.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Discrete means that there are separate ones. Discreet means that they keep their mouths shut.
If they are discreet, you wouldn't know about them, would you?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
If I took a bullet to the head, it wouldn't give me much comfort to know I had a brother as 'backup' though
;p
No, but it might give some comfort to your wife
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana