The Quietly Booming Business of Making Animals Live Forever (theatlantic.com) 72
Animal cloning has evolved from experimental science into a thriving commercial industry producing thousands of genetic copies across nearly 60 species, despite sustained public opposition to the technology. ViaGen Pets & Equine, the world's leading producer of cloned cats, dogs and horses, charges $50,000 to clone a pet and $85,000 for a horse, with customers joining waiting lists for the service.
The technology has found applications ranging from preserving exceptional beef cattle genetics to creating armies of polo horses. Top polo player Adolfo Cambiaso owns more than 100 clones of his best mare and once fielded an entire team riding copies of the same horse. West Texas A&M professor Ty Lawrence successfully cloned superior beef cattle from meat samples, with ranchers subsequently purchasing thousands of straws of semen from his cloned bulls. A 2023 Gallup survey found 61% of Americans still consider animal cloning "morally wrong," nearly unchanged since Dolly the sheep's 1996 debut, yet the industry continues expanding globally.
The technology has found applications ranging from preserving exceptional beef cattle genetics to creating armies of polo horses. Top polo player Adolfo Cambiaso owns more than 100 clones of his best mare and once fielded an entire team riding copies of the same horse. West Texas A&M professor Ty Lawrence successfully cloned superior beef cattle from meat samples, with ranchers subsequently purchasing thousands of straws of semen from his cloned bulls. A 2023 Gallup survey found 61% of Americans still consider animal cloning "morally wrong," nearly unchanged since Dolly the sheep's 1996 debut, yet the industry continues expanding globally.
Bananas, Cloning, and Moral Missteps (Score:5, Interesting)
Lack of biodiversity in crops is a ticking time bomb. Take bananas: ~99% of global exports are Cavendish, a single strain. No genetic variation means one nasty fungus (like Fusarium wilt TR4) could wipe them out. No backups, no resilience. We're repeating this with animal cloning, pushing uniform livestock genetics for max yield. Dolly's legacy isn't just cute sheep; it's a blueprint for brittle systems. One disease, one glitch, and we're screwed.
Morally, it's a mess. Engineering monocultures prioritizes profit over stability, gambling with food security. Our morals? They're cultural, forged by what worked: survival of the fittest at the societal level. Cultures that balanced diversity thrived; those that didn't, collapsed. Ignoring biodiversity now betrays that hard-won wisdom. We're not just risking crops or clones; we're betting against the evolutionary playbook that got us here.
Re: Bananas, Cloning, and Moral Missteps (Score:2)
Banana growers are well aware of this and keep various cultivars growing and ready to go.
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In much the same way that beekeepers produce queens on demand, making the bee-pocalypse little more than a business expense.
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Banana growers are well aware of this and keep various cultivars growing and ready to go.
They do, but for most consumers, the Cavendish is the banana. When it gets replaced by the next cultivar, there's going to be a lot of consumer confusion. Of course, this has already happened with the Gros Michel before the Cavendish. Still, I get the feeling that consumers today are possibly a little more pampered in their tastes, so the switchover might not be that easy.
Re: Bananas, Cloning, and Moral Missteps (Score:2)
Lack of biodiversity in crops is a ticking time bomb. Take bananas: ~99% of global exports are Cavendish, a single strain. No genetic variation means one nasty fungus (like Fusarium wilt TR4) could wipe them out.
So what do you propose? Bananas with seeds in them? Most people won't buy them because they're not exactly edible.
Re: Bananas, Cloning, and Moral Missteps (Score:4, Informative)
Multiple strains don't require seeds in each bananna. OTOH, one strain will always be more popular than the rest, so that will be the most profitable. Oops!
The current Cavendish strain is itself a successor strain. I believe the prior one was called Gros Michel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ), but I may have missed a few.
And keeping a reservoir of identical cultivars is not going to work, because the fungus can lay dormant in the soil.
Several of our most prominent crops are vulnerable to this kind of event, because monoculture is economically superior over most short periods of time. But over longer periods it leads to problems.
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Not necessarily. Compare with apples, where many varieties thrive. Some of that is growing area, different apples do well in different environments. But consumer preference is a big part. Some people like sweet apples, some like tart, some like sour. They have varying degrees of crispness. Different recipes call for different varieties.
So it is at least possible. Single-strain monoculture is not the i
Worse than Bananas, Not the Same Animal (Score:3)
Take bananas: ~99% of global exports are Cavendish, a single strain. No genetic variation...
Strains do have some, albeit very limited, genetic variation. Clones are worse because they have absolutely no genetic variation - assuming no errors in the clning process - making them even more susceptible to single diseases.
Worse, I see absolutely zero point in cloning pets. If we cloned our dog the new clone would lack any of the memories and knowledge of our current dog and since personality and behviour is a combination of both nature and nurture while the clone might end up being similar it would
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I remember a chat over beers back in my university days with a postgrad bio student and we came up with a pretty fun idea that might actually work regarding using cloning to *increase* biodiversity.
Imagine if you will that genomes only had 500 genes. About 450 where common amongst all mammals (In reality that commonality is MUCH higher).
What would happen if you took a thriving species and found all the diversity in genes in that 450 common gene area and took a highly endangered species and created a few hun
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. Take bananas: ~99% of global exports are Cavendish, a single strain. No genetic variation means one nasty fungus (like Fusarium wilt TR4) could wipe them out. No backups, no resilience.
There are plenty of other banana varieties to take their place.
You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score:4, Insightful)
Like what Sarah Winchester did where she thought her house was haunted so she kept building rooms for the ghosts.
It's a sign of our civilization collapsing.
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It's a sign of our civilization collapsing.
Not really. Stupid hobbies and pursuits of the ultra-rich are a great way to get them to put their money back into the economy. It helps us all if rich people spend their money as much as possible.
Doesn't really work that way (Score:3)
Re: You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score:2)
Sounds like what you guys said about computers. I.e. the party leadership doesn't see a use for it, ergo nobody should have it, and spin up some propaganda saying how it's a tool of the bourgeoisie. Right up until you realized you were falling behind in a really bad way. What is it you guys said? Something about selling you the rope you'll hang them with? And then you bought a rigged rope...
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Sounds like what you guys said about computers. I.e. the party leadership doesn't see a use for it, ergo nobody should have it, and spin up some propaganda saying how it's a tool of the bourgeoisie. Right up until you realized you were falling behind in a really bad way. What is it you guys said? Something about selling you the rope you'll hang them with? And then you bought a rigged rope...
The key to surviving in the world is identifying dangers using intelligence, logic, and facts. Ceding this to emotion is a risk proportional to the deviation from the former. Unfortunately in a democracy an illiterate uneducated reveling in reality denial 40% with financial distress from things they don’t understand and then fear is used to misdirect can then and is sinking the entire thing as they don’t understand what deck their very feet rest upon.
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This isn't democracy vs. something else, this is diversity vs monoculture. Monoculture is usually going to be more profitable, until things change. Then it's likely to collapse.
But democracy has it's own failure modes. They aren't much prettier than those of the autocracies. AFAIKT, China seems to be steering a middle course, embracing diverse opinions AS LONG AS THEY AREN'T POLITICAL. This isn't totally true, of course, as they also persecute a few minorities. (If you don't think the democracies do t
Re: You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score:2)
This is objectively false:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31... [cnn.com]
How is cleavage and time travel political? That's just stupid. Western lifestyles aren't political either, unless you do the typical thing that both fascist and communist governments are well known for where outside ideas are inherently political because they undermine your stupid cultural norms, which is exactly what China is afraid of.
Most importantly: This is exactly the opposite of diversity. Also you guys are always super quick to label busines
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Yes, but what about the cat I love, that died of some disease... I can bring it back through cloning!
Which means the disease would be cloned, and maybe when we get to cloning our beloved cat, maybe human resistance to the disease has left us, and now you just made another black plague.
Of course, if they can 100% clone your cat, the next step is humans.
Re: You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score:2)
Which means the disease would be cloned, and maybe when we get to cloning our beloved cat, maybe human resistance to the disease has left us, and now you just made another black plague.
I'm not sure where to begin.... I'll just start with: You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. You're talking about heritable diseases and infectious diseases as if they're the same thing, which means you don't understand anything about either, let alone why everything you just said isn't even relevant to this topic.
If I were to guess, I'd say your anti-GMO as well, and probably for the exact same reason: You fear everything you don't understand, which is basically...everything.
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The cater to bizarre wins of the ultra Rich because that's the only people who have any money anymore. Like what Sarah Winchester did where she thought her house was haunted so she kept building rooms for the ghosts. It's a sign of our civilization collapsing.
While civilization may indeed be collapsing, we went from needing $3 billion and a multinational effort over a decade to sequence a human genome to $600 and a few days. Cloning will soon be nearly as cheap and easy as taking a razor to a plant shoot and stuffing it in the ground. Until the actual collapse and then the high point of technology will be finding twinkies.
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Cloning plants has been easy for decades. (Well, at least for many plants. A few require more complex approaches.)
I expect cloning fish to be relatively easy. Mammals, OTOH, are always going to be difficult (bar a few exceptions, like the monotremes). And placental mammals are going to be worse. It will probably always take 9 months, give or take a bit, to clone a cow. And the intervening time is going to require a complex support systems.
Some things can be made simple and easy, others can't. Conside
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A good movie... 'Splice'
Create a thing, and then realize too late that you can't control it.
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I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.
Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.
All kind of sad really. Town
The internet is an environment an... (Score:2)
Not living forever (Score:3)
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Even if you do, expect variations. There are an unknown number of epigenetic markers, and part of the process is chaotic.
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For pets it's appealing but is ultimately worthles (Score:3)
I lost my dog of 14 years last summer, would it be tempting to just clone him? In a way of course, i miss him everyday but if I had a genetically identical puppy would that dog be my same dog? The answer is obviously no, he was around at a particular time of my life and his personality grew from those experiences same as me, this new dog may look like my boy but it's another dog and with that assumption then it's almost impossible to justify as it's not like the world is running out of dogs and cats to adopt.
I would support a law that said no pet cloning until we get the populations we've created under control. The fact we still have as many dogs and cats being purposefully bred and sold today is already an issue, don't need clones on top of it.
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but if I had a genetically identical puppy would that dog be my same dog? The answer is obviously no
If I replaced your workstation with the identical hardware and default installation of OS yours came with is that getting back your current workstation? Obviously not, it’s only hardware with base firmware and software. What makes your dog your dog is the experiences on top just like the software and files in your workstation. We need a way to image the hard drive, but we are back in the era where punchcards are still a pipe dream. You would get a dog similar personality wise to your dog, but most
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And to expand on it, even personality could be different.
Maybe the dog's formative couple of years was spent in a house with a yard, where he met the mailman every day and developed a general interest in meeting strangers. But now OP lives in an apartment, and here the mailman is just another weird noise outside the front door - probably something dangerous to chase away.
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Dolly the cloned sheep at birth had the same shortened telomeres of the original sheep. I don't think anyone is certain how that correlates with life span, but chances are the puppy you paid $50k for probably isn't going to live nearly as long as your old dog, or one from rescue.
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I remember reading that too. But the clones mentioned in the article are aging normally. And some have already died of old age, at a normal age. So it appears that cloned pets don't live any shorter lives than normal.
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Yeah that should also be illegal imo, or at least heavily restricted.
Farm animals might make sense and something like say working cattle dogs I would class differently. Of course there's no real means to enforce this but I would discourage it greatly with regards to pets. No $14k dogs while how many perfectly fine ones are getting gassed today.
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Yeah I am ok with that, that's the practical thing to do, banning is really more my moral view.
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Banning won't even slow it down, just move the activity. If it's banned in the US the cloning mills will just move to Uruguay or Vanuatu, people paying $50,000 for a dog won't even blink at the transport cost.
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Sad commentary (Score:2)
Learning to deal with loss and grief is an essential part of living a balanced, healthy life. My family has had a number of pets that were a part of our family. They lived with us, played with us, grew up with our children. But eventually the time came to say good-bye, and wee used those occasions to teach our children about the value and fleeting nature of life.
Each animal is unique, even if cloned. Cloning a pet seems like a futile attempt to hang on to that one "special" pet. A more healthy approach, it
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That's a nice daydream, but we're nowhere near being able to transfer experiences or memories or other personality traits. We can't even figure out exactly what makes people have mental illnesses--that kind of knowledge will certainly have to come before we can consider ourselves knowledgeable enough to understand how to "copy" a human's personality.
Even identical twins can be distinguished from each other through standard consumer DNA tests, hundreds or thousands of SNPs typically differ between them.
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I feel like I've seen both sides. Though I have to say I agree with you.
I had a neighbor that had a Golden Retriever, this was really a great dog, in the "best dog ever" category. The man that owned the dog was older and lived alone. When the dog died, he got another one that looked the same and gave it the same name. The second dog was some kind of inbred spaz and nothing like the previous dog. But the old guy kept him and took good care of him. Old guy repeated this two more times, four dogs, all the same
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I would guess that his experience would have been about the same, with cloned dogs.
But plant cloning is accepted and normal (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever eat a Hass Avocado? Every single one of them is grown from a branch grafted from a single tree originally purchased in 1926. If you plant the seed from a Hass Avocado, it will grow into a totally different Avocado. Basically Mr. Hass lucked out and grew a gorgeous Avocado, so he started selling grafts from that tree, now it is spread throughout the world. All cloned from a single plant.
Same thing for a lot of other plants, including apples, pears, and most cavendish bananas.
They are all clones of one plant we liked, so we went over-board on it.
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God: [recounting some of His creations to Jerry] Tobacco was one of My big mistakes. Ostriches were a mistake. Silly looking things. Avocados... made the pit too big.
I like ostriches.
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All cloned from a single plant.
A graft is not a clone, it is a part of the same plant, identical genes.
Also, doesn't work well with animals.
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And to me it's a little bit bullshit in that it's a very common kids project to grow an avocado seed with the toothpicks and the glass of water (which is fun!) only to find out if you spend the years caring for it you have like a 100% chance it won't taste the same and like an 80% chance it's just flat out gross. I get that's not the point and 99.9% of them won't get to that stage but still, kinda takes the wind out your sails that's it's purely decorative.
I guess there is a oh so very slight chance you co
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How is cloning an organism "living forever"? (Score:2)
A new organism is a new animal, new genes, new phenotype, new experience and character.
If it is a pet and you're treating it so superficially that you only need the same looks (which you won't get anyway), you should not be having it in the first place.
It is a living creature, not a piece of furniture.
Ditto for everything else in TFS.
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Everything correct except "new genes". The point of cloning is that the genes are identical. (Epigenetic markers, of course, will be different.) Genes aren't defined so much physically as by the information that they carry, and identical sequences carry the same information.
At the molecular level, identical molecules are essentially the same. Were two things identical down to the molecular level, one might reasonably call them the same thing. This, of course, never happens to macro-scale objects unless
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The point of cloning is that the genes are identical.
Yeah, in the ideal they are, but in practice they are not, for a host of reasons.
First, of course, there is no "single DNA" in the organism and this has nothing to do with the energy states of the molecule.
The original DNA that was formed inside the zygote isn't miraculously preserved - once the organism has aged, you have 30 trillion current copies of it, most with some differences. What "errors" you get depends on your sample, and you don't have a lot of control over it.
Plus, IIRC "cloning" doesn't clone
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It's definitely true that lots of cells have stripped down genomes, but you'd avoid the specialized cells when picking the material to clone. And most cells have a mutation or two (or more), so yeah, that's unavoidable. I was counting that as "noise level", and it usually is.
I'm not certain about the practical cloning, but my understanding was that the problem was they were carrying excess material, not insufficient material. Setting the epigenetic markers to that for a newly fertilized egg isn't yet per
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Ok, I see.
I recall early on there were some lawsuits because people were unhappy the clone cat or dog they got was obviously different from the animal that died. What I remember of the explanation was what I said above, but I probably misremembered it.
It's an old meme ... (Score:2)
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Shit, the Literalians infected Picard's mind again.
You know this experience will (Score:2)
be used to clone humans one day. Most nations may ban it, but enough will allow it that it's not going away. Rich people will be able to get clones.
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It was already happening in the 70's in the USSR.
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Shit, there's 500 Putins floatin' around?
Huh. (Score:2)
Whenever we played Polopony, I was the old boot.
Question (Score:2)
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I'm sure people are getting cloned. See my post above.
Repet is real. (Score:2)
Ha. I didn't realize it was already real. Which movie was that?
Repeat is indeed real (Score:2)
The movie was The 6th Day [wikipedia.org]. I'm shocked that nobody else referenced this movie in all the comments.
A clone is not the same animal (Score:1)
Another reason to eat the rich (Score:1)
They are an environmental disaster. Can we find them their own planet?
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I read somewhere that they taste like sushi.