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

Nature versus nurture

[beders]

Just because the cloned animal has exactly the same genes, doesn't mean that it will exhibit the same behaviour.

The dog that played Benji might have had an ideal temperament for filming, but it's clone, brought up slightly differently might be a right little ankle biter.

Glossing over the actual money maker.

[will_die]

While selling back a physical looking animal will bring in a fair chunk of change, and really how big can that market be. How much work would they have to do to make a benji next year, the main thing would be the breed and same hair color and pattern ; thoses can be changed by dye and makeup.

Where the big money will be is selling clones to the public. When a popular show/movie has a animal the sales of that animal almost aways increases. For example when the comedy Fraiser was on the air the Jack Russell terrier rose in popularity in the each year(in 2000 along by 21%). Now instead of purchasing any Jack Russell terrier you can purchase a clone of the actual one on the show. How much do you think people would pay for that?
Granted costs will have to come down ALOT, but if you are thinking for the future this is the way to go.