Couple's New Dog Cloned from Old Pet

[JCFantasy23]

Haven't seen this elsewhere yet in the forums, so...


To me this is just creepy.



And, from my local newspaper of The Lakeland Ledger:



MIAMI | A Boca Raton couple got a new dog, and it’s just like their old dog. Not just the same breed and gender, but the same DNA.

Nina and Edgar Otto picked up their cloned yellow lab puppy at the Miami International Airport Monday night. Lancelot Encore was cloned from the DNA of the Ottos’ late dog Lancelot, which died of cancer in January 2008. Guessing that pet cloning would one day be possible, the Ottos had DNA samples of their dog frozen five years ago.
The Ottos paid $155,000 in a San Francisco biotech firm’s dog-cloning auction last July.
BioArts International created Lancelot Encore in South Korea, where he was born 10 weeks ago. The Ottos say he’s the first single-birth, commercially cloned puppy in the United States.

 

[Gilyon]

I don't know why somebody would want to do this... I mean, whether human or animal, everything is the sum of their experiences as well as their genetics. When my cat died, I wouldn't have wanted to clone him; the resulting animal wouldn't be him anymore then if he had had kittens and I kept one of them. It seems it would make more sense just to get a new dog for less money. It would be as much the dead dog as the clone will be.

 

[smos]

That's pretty neat.... maybe not $155k neat, but still.

 

[JCFantasy23]

I don't know why somebody would want to do this... I mean, whether human or animal, everything is the sum of their experiences as well as their genetics. When my cat died, I wouldn't have wanted to clone him; the resulting animal wouldn't be him anymore then if he had had kittens and I kept one of them. It seems it would make more sense just to get a new dog for less money. It would be as much the dead dog as the clone will be.

I agree. There are plenty of dogs out there looking for good homes without copying the DNA of the dead pets.

 

[CyberPaladin]

Yeah it's to bad they wasted all that money when there are some many shelter dogs and free ones in the paper.

 

[ErinBear]

I would probably not cloned my pet or a person.

 

[pgp_protector]

Well just think of it this way, that's 155K into that company's economy, that can keep a few people employed for a while longer

 

[BlackAndy]

$155,000.

So much good could have been done. Unfortunate.

 

[Fantine]

Stephen King wrote about this very thing in "Pet Sematery."

Who knew that life would imitate art?

(And if the plot goes the way Stephen King's did, the couple had better make tracks fast.)