Inside the Business of Dog Cloning
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
Life is full of death and sadness, people and animals you care deeply about don't live forever. Being able to deal with grief and continue living your life is an important skill to develop. I'm not sure that grasping to maintain what is ultimately unmaintainable is a healthy way of handling it. The clone won't be the same dog, if anything it's going to make it harder to grieve and move on with your life.
The most powerful takeaway for me was that in spite of how little time I spent with her, she enriched my life incredibly...it seems so detached from reality to try to artificially extend that experience...
Producing a clone would not produce the same dog, but it'd be like one of his littermates. It'd be pretty neat to give that roll of the DNA dice another shot, see what kind of dog comes out of it.
The suffering involved in the cloning process is a huge turn off though and makes it a no go for me.
Not to mention rescues can come with a lot of problems, physiologically and psychologically. I can understand why people might shy away.
How different would she end up? There are a lot of mannerisms that seem pretty common to beagles, and then there's some of the weird stuff she does that is unique to her. Would we lose all that? Would it feel weird having a dog that looked just like her but acted different?
Better to just cherish the life while it’s there.
Yes!
You cannot really clone a living thing, we can only make something that somewhat has the same DNA, but that is not a copy!
By the way, I love my dog but kind of struggle with the ethics of simple ownership of a living thing.
But all technologies like this, meant ultimately for humans, will be tested on animals first.
If we are going to learn and refine cloning on dogs anyway..... they scientists might as well bring back "Captain Fluffles".
Science is so unpredictable that we shouldn't restrict progress just because it feels 'creepy'.
Highlight:
Petstuffers: when you just can't let go,
and coming soon: Grandparents forever!
[1] Full Transcript + original longer rant I wrote because this $100K to clone your pet thing rubs me the wrong way: https://gist.github.com/jaytaylor/92a52144d1fec39ef41a6fb941...
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P.S. Does this fall under the category of "it's okay to do creepy shit, as long as you're R$CH"?
Consider these 2 scenarios:
1. Some guy clones his deceased dog in his garage.
Reaction: That sounds creepy
2. Barbra Streisand pays $100,000 to clone her deceased dog.
Reaction: Socially acceptable
"Rule 1: Be attractive." applies to companies as well as people.
I wonder if it is still, though. The spacious, sterile looking, brightly-lit white rooms inhabited by attractive, perfectly dressed and groomed staff have been a synonym to "some sick dystopian shit is going on here" in books and movies for quite some time now.
With a mortality rate as low as 66% for a full litter, one has to wonder how realistic our dreams of human cloning really are.
Is that because of technological limitations, or simply because they don't care if the mother survives?
The main obstacles here are access to donor eggs and surrogate mothers willing to carry. This may already have happened. Additionally, failure rates acceptable with dogs and livestock are going to cause moral outrage. Though if you look at IVF, the success rates there are not great and it is considered acceptable anyway. Never mind the discarded embryos, miscarriages, etc. Many couples try for years before succeeding.
Ongoing progress might make a few of these things easier. E.g. producing egg cells from normal cells might become feasible. Also there is some progress with artificial wombs. Add to that improvements to gene manipulation and you are looking at industrial scale production of clones of all sorts of species. I see this more as a question of when than if. Human cloning is inevitable.
The main obstacles for this are entirely non technical. There are enough religious and political constraints that this will have to happen under the radar and in less strict countries for a while. Barbara Streisand cloning her dogs sort of moves us toward that though.
Puppies are cute and so what if they were cloned? Are human babies so different? You can bet that there are some dictators, billionairs, etc. out there that would love to have a "mini me". It's the ultimate in narcissism and hedonism. Trump might be interested, just saying ;-). He's insensitive enough to not give a F* what everybody else things. This baby is going to be great. I will be the best child ever!
I cannot think about dog cloning without remembering Fry's speech upon throwing the fossilized remains of his faithful Seymour into the lava beneath Planet Express, and it tears me up everytime.