Slashdot Mirror
Get the Family Dog Cloned
Anonymous writes "Some of you may have seen 'The 6th Day,' the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger a few years back. If you recall there was a 're-pet' cloning service to get your dog back if you ever lost them. Enter 'Best Friends Again': 'A US biotech company on Wednesday announced it will auction off the right for five dog owners to have their furry best friend cloned, with bidding starting at 100,000 dollars. "BioArts International ... will sell five dog cloning service slots to the general public via a worldwide online auction," the California-based biotech start-up said in a statement.'"
There's also the problem of genotype vs phenotype. Fido's genes may be expressed differently the next go-round, leading to subtle or possibly not-so-subtle differences. And as you intimated, how the clone is raised will be just as important as its genes.
But Fido could be brought back once we perfect that brain-scanning thingy in the 6th Day movie. Genotype, phenotype, and, uh...brainotype would be so close to the original Fido, that Fido 2.0 would seem almost identical. But without the scanner doohicky, Fido 2.0 will be just another dog.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
What I'm curious about is whether the cloned dog will smell exactly like the original to other dogs. Scent is more important to dogs than sight; that butt-sniffing ritual they perform when they meet each other lets them remember each other for a long time. Smelling another dog's urine will let a dog know who the other dog was, whether it was male/female (and if the latter, where it was in its menses), whether it was sick, etc.
So if I cloned Aloysius, would my other dogs think the new dog was him? If I cloned him while he was alive, would he think he was smelling himself?