Animal Tales
Twenty-five years since Dolly the Sheep: Who’s cloning now?
Do you remember Dolly the Sheep? Next year it will be twenty-five years since the world-famous ruminant became the first mammal to be created by cloning, a scientific process designed to generate a genetically identical copy of an animal. What’s involved in cloning? The process starts with cultured cells taken from the animal that is to be cloned. Scientists then remove fertilised eggs from the fallopian tubes of another, unrelated, animal. The next step is to suck out the fertilised nucleus using a thin needle, or by treating the egg with ultraviolet light. What is left is essentially a ‘blank slate’, which is filled with the cells from the target animal. In a final twist reminiscent of those old Frankenstein movies, the egg is hit with a blast of electricity that fuses the host and the inserted cells together and jumpstarts cell division. If the process is successful and the cells begin to multiply, the next stage is to surgically implant the modified egg into a surrogate mother animal, which is then treated with hormones to ensure the pregnancy remains stable. Who clones their pets? The huge costs involved in creating a genetic copy of an animal tend to make pet cloning the preserve of the very wealthy. A few years ago the singer Barbra Streisand caused shockwaves when she announced that she had cloned her recently deceased dog Samantha. In 2016 fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg paid $100,000 (£75,700) for a clone of her Jack Russell dog and music producer Simon Cowell recently told a tabloid newspaper that he intends to clone his beloved dogs Squiddly, Diddly and Freddy. Pet lovers have also been keen to clone their
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cats. The first commercially produced cat clone was ‘Little Nicky’, born in 2004. The cat’s owner, a woman from Texas named Julie, refused to disclose her surname after paying $50,000 dollars for the service. The pros and cons of cloning It’s easy to understand why owners might want to clone a much-loved family pet after years of companionship, but anti-cloning campaigners point out that creating just one clone can lead to unnecessary suffering for the other animals involved. During the cloning process these animals are subject to repeated invasive procedures in order to harvest and transplant the eggs, and not all attempts end in success. During a recent attempt to clone a pet cat in China, forty cloned embryos were implanted into four surrogate mother cats. These implants produced three pregnancies, two of which ended in miscarriages. There’s clearly a conflict between owners’ expectations of a happy ‘reunion’ with a nearidentical copy of their pet and the views of animal rights campaigners, who say that it’s unacceptable to exploit animals for pet cloning. In the end it seems that the commercial drive to make money is likely to win out over any scruples we may have about animal welfare. A recent newspaper interview with Wang Chuduan, a professor at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, sums the situation up neatly. The professor told the New York Times that cloning ”satisfies the owner’s spiritual needs and increases happiness,” adding: “There is a market demand. So what’s the problem?”
By Kate McLelland
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