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

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome our furry overlords!

Re:I for one

[mausmalone]

/me shoots you. twice.

Re:I for one

[Thangodin]

$50,000 to clone my cat? Christ, I paid $250 to have the sucker put down, and I thought that was a lot...

Looking forward to it!

[AtariAmarok]

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.

Re:Looking forward to it!

[ikkonoishi]

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.

I wonder

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

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'.

I tawt I taw a puddy cat...

[andreMA]

again...

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.

Is the RIAA ok with this?

[AtariAmarok]

"Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M, created CopyCat"

Someone better check with the RIAA to make sure that this does not violate the DMCA.

This should solve a dilemma

[BJZQ8]

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?

$50,000....

[Tebriel]

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.

Prosecution

[maxchaote]

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

Genetic Savings & Clone

[Otter]

Whatever you think of the business model, that name freaking rocks.

I mean, it would be stupid in a science fiction story, but to actually operate under that name has to earn some points.

Inevitably the same

[wombatmobile]

It'll be the same cat. For the same reason that your girlfriend is turning into her mother.

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:A hot girl's DNA

[plover]

and I used this service, would the clone be "owned" by me? Could I force it to have sex with me whenever I wanted?

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!

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.

But how long will it live?

[TrevorB]

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.

to all the nay-sayers out there...

[dAzED1]

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.

Not just telomeres, but DNA methylation states

[scotay]

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.

You're getting confused...

[lxt]

"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!

Re:More ammo for Osama

[Moofie]

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?