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

[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'.

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

[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?

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.

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!

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.