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...

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

[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.

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.

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.