Fla. Couple pick up their cloned yellow lab puppy
MIAMI (AP) - 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.
Now, I believe that cloning has its place. I want to say that right off the bat. Cloning organs, for example, would be a huge scientific advancement, because someone needing a heart transplant could just get his or her own heart cloned (using a gene knock-out technique to destroy any genetic defects the heart may have), and there would be no risk of his or her body rejecting it. No need for anti-rejection drugs, etc, etc. It is also closely related to stem cell research, so advances in cloning may help in that area, as well, but this nonsense (article above) is just plain wrong!
Let's teach our children that, when a beloved pet dies, it's no big deal! We just a need a bit of Fluffy's DNA and a load of cash, and we'll get to have Fluffy2, an genetic copy of our dead pet. Perfect in every way.
...ahem...of course, there's no saying that there really would be cloning errors as we see in the movie Multiplicity, since a clone is an exact genetic copy, when done correctly. It is exactly the same in each and every way...which is exactly why I'm against the idea of cloning entire organisms.
You see, as someone who once wanted to be a geneticist, I have what probably isn't a unique view of cloning, but it is one that, perhaps, the Average Joe might not think about. The idea behind reproduction is genetic advancement of the species. Cloning is anything but. A clone is an exact copy of the original, making the next generation exactly the same as the one before. There is no genetic improvement, no chance for adaptation, and no true advancement of the species. In 1997, the average annual milk production per cow (in Oklahoma, because that's the only chart I could find that would tell me anything useful) was around 14,000 pounds (that's around 1,647 gallons of milk per cow per year, for those who are curious), by by 2006, that had climbed to almost 17,000 pounds (2,000 gallons). If someone had cloned an average cow in 1997, the calf was born in 1998, and she came into milk in 2000, she would have been producing about 1,000 pounds (~117.6 gallons) less than the average cow of her generation. Of course, they didn't clone an average cow, they cloned a super cow: Aspen, the Holstein who they say produced 35,000 pounds (4,117.6 gallons) annually. I don't know what Amy's milk production turned out to be, but I am not sure that is was the same as Aspen's.
There is, of course, a good reason for full-animal cloning. Not genetically, of course. It makes an ideal way to run experiments on drugs and the like, because the control animal can be genetically identical to the animals used in the experiment, making genetic differences a non-issue when analyzing the outcome of the tests (say, they're testing something that helps an animal live longer, and the not genetically identical control animal dies of natural causes that are actually created by a genetic defect no one knows it has, while the animal on the experimental drug lives almost twice as long. With cloning, that would not happen, and the results of the study can be considered more accurate). They can also be used to see if the clones would all end up just like their original, even if raised in different environments, and to see how those different environments seem to effect the animals. Things like that. Of course this can (and has, as far as i know) been done with mice. It's economically inefficient to use cows, for example, because they can't safely reproduce until 1.5 years of age, where as mice are ready to go in 4-7 weeks (and will only live up to about 3 years, while the average life-span of a cow is 20 or so years, so waiting for a cow to die of old age takes considerably longer, too). The cow and sheep cloning, in my opinion, was more to see if it could be done.
There are other issues with cloning, as well. Rapid aging, for example. Unfortunately, I couldn't gain access to the entire article put up by Dr's Yang and Tian (of UConn), because I don't have a subscription to the web site and am no longer an active student, meaning I can't use UConn's account access the paper (it's here, if anyone with access wants to take a look), but, if I remember correctly, there is some evidence to support the idea that an animal cloned from an adult may suffer from rapid aging.
Basically, I am of the belief that it is too early to tell if cloning Fido is really a good idea. Of course, the other problem with cloning the family pet is the fact that the owners will expect the copy to be exactly like the original, which it won't be if they don't treat it exactly the same as they treated Fido1.
