I easily understand economically motivated cloning. For pets, I find it a little sad. For the owner, they're depriving themselves of novelty and the kind of appreciation they'll get for their deceased pet when contrasted with a new one.
He was gathering data at another slaughterhouse in 2010 when, late one evening, he spotted two carcasses resembling the outlier he’d seen years before. Lawrence—by then an animal-science professor at West Texas A&M University—immediately called the head of his department. It was nearly 11 p.m. and his boss was already in bed, but Lawrence made his pitch anyway: He wanted to reverse engineer an outstanding steak by bringing superior cuts of meat back to life. He would clone the dead animals, and then mate the clones. “Think of our project as one in which you’re crossbreeding carcasses,” he told me.A few years later, Lawrence and his team turned two tiny cubes of meat, sliced off exceptional beef carcasses at a packing plant, into one cloned bull and three cloned heifers. After breeding the bull with the heifers, Lawrence slaughtered the offspring to assess the quality of the meat, and found it to be just as terrific as the originals’. The next generation’s meat was even better than that—superior, even, to that of animals bred from the cattle industry’s top bulls.
ViaGen’s office is hung with dozens of portraits of saucer-eyed kittens and bow-tie-wearing puppies—all made in its lab. “Lasting Love” is the company’s slogan, and its website features nearly 200 endorsements from pet owners, such as the grieving companion of the late Ceaser the cat, who writes, “What’s a splurge on luxury items when you can bring back a piece of your heart that you thought was broken forever.” The lasting love does not come cheap: $50,000 for a cat or dog, or $85,000 for a horse, payable online via credit card with all the ease of buying a blender. Once cloning is complete, the company provides clients with a DNA test, performed by an independent lab, confirming that the resulting baby is, in fact, a clone.
I know they're copying nuclear DNA, but I've always wondered about mitochondrial DNA in the cloning process. It sounds like they stick the fully cloned cell in though, which would contain cloned mitochondria. I also wonder about more delicate and poorly understood things like epigenetics.
Although ViaGen says it has introduced its own refinements over the years, the cloning process, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, still follows the same basic steps first developed in 1952 by researchers in Philadelphia to copy a frog embryo. It requires removing an unfertilized egg (an oocyte) from a donor animal, then wiping it clean of its own DNA so it can carry the clone’s. Working at a microscope beside a photo of Paris Hilton posing poolside with her cloned Chihuahua, a ViaGen lab technician uses a glass-tipped pipette to suck out the oocyte’s genetic material and, in its place, insert one of your animal’s newly grown cells, which contains its DNA—and thus all the information, from fur hue to leg length, to grow a twin.
Opponents of cloning object that it does not reliably produce healthy animals. ViaGen doesn’t publish its data on the grounds that doing so would reveal proprietary information. Russell did tell me that 60 to 70 percent of ViaGen’s cloned horse embryos will, after being transferred, result in a pregnancy—a success rate on par with the industry standard for regular embryo transfers. Yet cloned mammals that make it to term have been born with enlarged tongues, abnormal kidneys, overdeveloped muscles, defective hearts, and malformed brains, among other ailments. Kheiron, an Argentine company that clones horses, told Vanity Fair in 2015 that a quarter of its foals suffered from “serious or fatal health issues.”
To many of ViaGen’s clients, cloning is appealing because of the potential they see to replicate an animal’s physical and mental makeup. ViaGen’s website assures customers that a clone can share the original’s temperament and intelligence. But some people have come to believe that clones get even more from the founder animal than that: They theorize that past experiences can be recorded in an organism’s cells through a process they refer to as “cellular memory,” and transmitted just like eye color. “There’s not a scientist in the world who will agree with me, except that I’ve seen it,” Veneklasen said.The cloning community abounds in anecdotes: six-month-old puppies that supposedly complete agility courses as well as a five-year-old dog would; horses with the founder animal’s same fear of garden hoses or antipathy toward men. ViaGen studiously avoids making promises about cellular memory, which remains firmly a theory. Only a handful of studies have compared the behavior of clones with more traditionally bred animals, and these have found negligible differences. A 2003 paper that analyzed nine cloned pigs found that their habits and preferences varied as much as—and in some cases more than—those of eight naturally bred pigs. To what degree anyone’s behavior is shaped by genetics versus other factors continues to be a mystery, one I couldn’t help thinking of as I watched the identical twins at Veneklasen’s clinic doing their rounds. “It is funny: We both ended up doing the same thing,” Looman told me. “I don’t think we would’ve thought that.”