Animal Cloning Comes to Hollywood

Kate Thompson writes "A week after San Francisco's Genetic Savings and Clone revealed the sale of their first cat to a customer, the Boston Phoenix reports that GS & C acknowledges it has been hired by anonymous buyers in Hollywood to bank genes of show business animals."

Comments

Re:This might work for Babe: 3

[The Mutant]

Apparently, no fewer than 47 piglets.

Now that's a lot of pork!

Doesn't work that way.

[Gordonjcp]

Look at identical twins - how many do you know who have *exactly* the same personality, interests, tastes, etc.? Allow for the similarity of upbringing (non-twin siblings are usually pretty similar), of course.

The other problem is that, as we found with "Dolly the Sheep", cloned animals are inherently pretty unhealthy, because their cells age a lot faster (lies to children explanation). At two years old, Dolly had a lot of problems that would really only crop up in a much older animal, presumably because the cell's genetic "clock" was not "reset" (LTC again).

Still, nice work if you can get it. Who's going to tell the difference, even if the animals are *not* cloned?

Re:Nature versus nurture

[gauge boson]

Actually, even their phenotype (expressed genetics) might be different from the original due to environmental influences. This is practically guaranteed for female clones because they have a lot of extra genetic material in the second X chromasome that gets turned off during gestation. This can lead to some rather stark contrasts between 'originals' and clones - e.g., cloned cats with different color patterns. For instance, CC is a tiger-tabby because her surrogate mother, not the original (a calico), was.

Re:Nature versus nurture

[DrEldarion]

Yes, they are, hence "identical". What happens with identical twins is that the egg splits after it has been fertilized, leading to two people with the exact same DNA.