RedCountry
Well-known member
Kinda interesting. Would any of you do it? Is Sparky really worth it? Heck I could go get a new hound dog from the pound for $35 with shots. :blink:
Pet Replicants
If you've ever looked at your pet and wished it would live forever, a company in California may have the solution for you.
Sort of.
For $50,000, Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC) says it will clone your cat. And dogs are not far behind.
In May, GSC took orders to clone eight cats and still has room for one more. The original delivery date was in November and has since been pushed back to December. Otherwise, the company's experiment in commercial pet cloning is right on track. Next year, GSC hopes to clone more cats for less. The price will eventually drop to a low five-figure or high four-figure number.
Cloning is one of the most misunderstood terms in modern science. While science fiction describes clones as full-grown (and usually evil) copies of the original, real clones are more like latter-day identical twins. The clone is a new baby that shares the original animal's genes, but not its environment. As such, it would resemble the donor in behavior and looks, but it would have its own personality.
Even though there's a high demand for it, no one has been able to clone a dog because the canine reproductive system is especially complicated. But scientists are getting closer.
"There's a 50% chance we'll succeed in cloning a dog by the end of this year," says GSC spokesperson Ben Carlson. "After we clone a dog, we should be able to offer dog cloning to the public within a year."
In the meantime, customers can gene-bank their pets, meaning that GSC will store your pet's tissue for possible future cloning. To gene-bank, a veterinarian collects a skin sample from the pet and GSC treats and maintains the cells. Dead pets can also be gene-banked if the owner is quick to get the body to the vet. For a living pet, gene banking costs $895 plus a yearly maintenance fee of $100. A dead pet costs $1,395 plus a $150 maintenance fee.
John Sperling, the entrepreneur who started the University of Phoenix franchise, founded GSC. In 1997, after hearing about the first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, Sperling began looking into cloning his family dog, Missy. The resulting “Missyplicity” project was run by Texas A&M University; in 2002, the project produced Carbon Copy or CC, the first cloned cat.
Surprisingly, CC and her donor cat, Rainbow, don't look alike. Rainbow is a calico and CC is a tiger-tabby, a result of a genetic complexity lying on the X chromosome. However, GSC guarantees its clients that the cloned cat will look like the original, or their money back.
Coning is a delicate procedure. Scientists insert a cell from the donor into an enucleated egg—an egg that has been stripped of its original genetic material. The egg is then being fertilized and planted in a surrogate Mom. Many planted embryos are miscarried or aborted, and at least 25% are born with varying degrees of abnormalities, ranging from serious problems to minor birth defects.
There's also concern about the long-term health of clones. Dolly the sheep, for example, developed obesity, arthritis, and died earlier than normal.
Whereas GSC is quick to point to CC as an example of a healthy cloned animal, David Magnus, co-director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, says: “The health record of cloned animals is not very good. There's no clear case of a cloned animal with a healthy full-functioning life."
Other Critics of GSC say pet owners may use cloning as a substitution for grief, or may be disappointed if the new animal acts differently from the original. Animal rights activists complain about pet overpopulation and the animals that are destroyed because of cloning.
Other people simply feel that we don't know enough about cloning to make it public yet.
"It's my strong belief that cloning is very important to the future of science," says Murali Pillai, a biology professor a Sonoma State University in California. "But there's also a wide variety of ethical issues surrounding cloning. It just may be a little to early to commercialize this technique."
Doggone.
Pet Replicants
If you've ever looked at your pet and wished it would live forever, a company in California may have the solution for you.
Sort of.
For $50,000, Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC) says it will clone your cat. And dogs are not far behind.
In May, GSC took orders to clone eight cats and still has room for one more. The original delivery date was in November and has since been pushed back to December. Otherwise, the company's experiment in commercial pet cloning is right on track. Next year, GSC hopes to clone more cats for less. The price will eventually drop to a low five-figure or high four-figure number.
Cloning is one of the most misunderstood terms in modern science. While science fiction describes clones as full-grown (and usually evil) copies of the original, real clones are more like latter-day identical twins. The clone is a new baby that shares the original animal's genes, but not its environment. As such, it would resemble the donor in behavior and looks, but it would have its own personality.
Even though there's a high demand for it, no one has been able to clone a dog because the canine reproductive system is especially complicated. But scientists are getting closer.
"There's a 50% chance we'll succeed in cloning a dog by the end of this year," says GSC spokesperson Ben Carlson. "After we clone a dog, we should be able to offer dog cloning to the public within a year."
In the meantime, customers can gene-bank their pets, meaning that GSC will store your pet's tissue for possible future cloning. To gene-bank, a veterinarian collects a skin sample from the pet and GSC treats and maintains the cells. Dead pets can also be gene-banked if the owner is quick to get the body to the vet. For a living pet, gene banking costs $895 plus a yearly maintenance fee of $100. A dead pet costs $1,395 plus a $150 maintenance fee.
John Sperling, the entrepreneur who started the University of Phoenix franchise, founded GSC. In 1997, after hearing about the first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, Sperling began looking into cloning his family dog, Missy. The resulting “Missyplicity” project was run by Texas A&M University; in 2002, the project produced Carbon Copy or CC, the first cloned cat.
Surprisingly, CC and her donor cat, Rainbow, don't look alike. Rainbow is a calico and CC is a tiger-tabby, a result of a genetic complexity lying on the X chromosome. However, GSC guarantees its clients that the cloned cat will look like the original, or their money back.
Coning is a delicate procedure. Scientists insert a cell from the donor into an enucleated egg—an egg that has been stripped of its original genetic material. The egg is then being fertilized and planted in a surrogate Mom. Many planted embryos are miscarried or aborted, and at least 25% are born with varying degrees of abnormalities, ranging from serious problems to minor birth defects.
There's also concern about the long-term health of clones. Dolly the sheep, for example, developed obesity, arthritis, and died earlier than normal.
Whereas GSC is quick to point to CC as an example of a healthy cloned animal, David Magnus, co-director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, says: “The health record of cloned animals is not very good. There's no clear case of a cloned animal with a healthy full-functioning life."
Other Critics of GSC say pet owners may use cloning as a substitution for grief, or may be disappointed if the new animal acts differently from the original. Animal rights activists complain about pet overpopulation and the animals that are destroyed because of cloning.
Other people simply feel that we don't know enough about cloning to make it public yet.
"It's my strong belief that cloning is very important to the future of science," says Murali Pillai, a biology professor a Sonoma State University in California. "But there's also a wide variety of ethical issues surrounding cloning. It just may be a little to early to commercialize this technique."
Doggone.
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