In the past I’ve had no qualms about the ethics of cloning. Many species of plants do it all the time, where it’s better known as vegetative reproduction. Some animals, too, have the option of reproduction through direct copy, such as hydras. It’s a valid reproduction technique that was lost somewhere along the evolutionary tree.

But now I’m reading “Frankenstein’s cat” by Emily Anthes, which I thoroughly recommend. This book has the very unusual triple property of being informative, unbiased and readable. I’m coming to the rather preposterous conclusion that the cloning of cats is ethical but the cloning of dogs is not.

Why? Because, for some unknown reason, the cloning of dogs is a much more difficult process than the cloning of cats. For cats, embryos can come from the tissue normally destroyed after spaying and brought to term in a petri dish. And a relatively large proportion of implanted clone embryos come to term.

On the other hand the cloning of dogs is, as one researcher put it, a nightmare. To create Snuppy, the first cloned dog, 1095 cloned embryos were implanted into 123 female dogs to get a single clone. Who would be prepared to go though 123 pregnancies just to get 1 child? In another case the implantation of even more embryos over many years produced not even a single cloned dog. In addition, for dogs the ovarian tissue can’t be matured to term in vitro, so embryos can only be collected a few at a time from ovulating dogs, each one of which could have ended up as a normally-conceived puppy. All in all, my opinion now is to oppose dog cloning because of the the suffering involved in the hundreds of medical procedures needed for each clone.

What do you think? How many cloned animals now exist?

Is this an ethics question or a guess the number of clones question? If the latter then ~2349587235.

“Who would be prepared to go though 123 pregnancies just to get 1 child?”

you don’t hang out at IVF clinics much do you?

• What do you think?

Sounds like they need more practice, which is probably why they persist…

• How many cloned animals now exist?

Who says this:

“I was cloned.”

The original, or the copy?

// rather preposterous

false

What’s the endgame in regards to cloning
No need really to clone animals except to see if we can do it and is it all in preparation to clone humans (which despite being banned will happen if it hasn’t already)
One can imagine that scene out of Alien Resurrection with all the failed clones before you get a viable one.

Human cloning for what purpose, organ compatibility for the original and even then the clone has to grow up for the organs to be useful. I imagine if you could drastically speed up the growth you’d get out of control cancers growing. We’d be better of cloning organs and finding a way to long term store them.

• What’s the endgame in regards to cloning

I think one end point is not the ability to clone an exact copy of a person but to construct a genetically superior individual.

• No need really to clone animals

Race Horses?

furious said:

• What’s the endgame in regards to cloning

I think one end point is not the ability to clone an exact copy of a person but to construct a genetically superior individual.

• No need really to clone animals

Race Horses?

Race horses would be the most useful one I can think of.
In regards to constructing a genetically superior individual could we alter the DNA of an fully grown individual whose given consent or do we need to do it as an embryo splicing in bits and pieces.

Arts said:

“Who would be prepared to go though 123 pregnancies just to get 1 child?”

you don’t hang out at IVF clinics much do you?

Good point. If IVF clinics existed at the time of my second marriage I would have, because I have an inherited genetic disease that can easily be detected in vitro.

> Is this an ethics question or a guess the number of clones question?

Both. For number of clones, it has to at least exceed the number on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_have_been_cloned
That list includes clones of 23 species:
1 Carp
2 Cat
3 Cattle
4 Deer
5 Dog
6 Ferret
7 Frog (tadpole)
8 Fruit flies
9 Gaur
10 Goat
11 Horse
12 Mice
13 Mouflon
14 Mule
15 Pig
16 Pyrenean ibex
17 Rabbit
18 Rat
19 Rhesus Monkey
20 Sheep
21 Water Buffalo
22 Wolf
23 Zebrafish

Reasons for cloning range from general research into cloning (eg. Zebrafish, rat, frog, fruit fly), cloning of loved pets, cloning of endangered species, cloning of animals that can’t reproduce (Mule), and cloning for improving agriculture.

> I’m coming to the rather preposterous conclusion that the cloning of cats is ethical but the cloning of dogs is not.

Oh dear.

The only company mentioned on the web offering the cloning of cats, “Genetic Savings and Clone” has shut down because for even as little as $32,000 per clone there have been no takers. So far as I can tell, there is now nobody on the world you can turn to to get your cat cloned.

On the other hand, dog cloning is still being offered on a commercial basis, at $100,000 per clone, from Sooam Biotech Research Foundation laboratory in South Korea. Business seems to be booming. This is being run by the same person convicted of fraud in claiming a cloned human embryo, Woo Suk Hwang. This news article from Nature magazine is highly revealing: http://www.nature.com/news/cloning-comeback-1.14504

Hwang opened Sooam in July 2006. He has since cloned hundreds of animals — dogs, cows, pigs and coyotes … Since 2006, Sooam has cloned more than 400 dogs, mostly pets. Sooam has begun supplying dogs to the Korean National Police Agency in Seoul in the hope that clones of proven service animals will quickly learn their trade as sniffer dogs.

A door just off the foyer leads to a corridor of canine chaos. In stalls to the left, Tibetan mastiff and Australian shepherd puppies are cavorting. A Yorkshire terrier dances back and forth on its hind legs. And an adult mongrel howls with separation anxiety, only calming down when the two beagle pups that she gave birth to are returned to her pen. She doesn’t know that she is just a surrogate mother, nor that the pups are highly unusual dog clones, engineered to show the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

The right side of the corridor houses a wall-sized window that looks onto an operating theatre. Inside, Woo Suk Hwang, in a blue surgeon’s gown, cap and mask, is working on a bitch in labour. He greets his visitors through a microphone headset and then explains that this is an emergency: one of the puppies is stuck in the cervix. He makes an incision and carefully probes the dog’s womb until the whitish sausage of a puppy emerges. After it is wiped down, Hwang holds it to his ear, listening for sounds of breathing. He then gently massages the groggy pup into consciousness and goes back for the last one. Minutes later he announces: “We have saved all three cloned dogs.” Hwang brims with pride.

Using cloning technology, Sooam is creating cows that produce the human interferon protein, which can be used for treating a number of human diseases, in their milk, and pigs that are genetically tweaked so that their organs might be suitable for transplantation into humans. Sooam researchers have also created new models for diabetes by putting genes that cause symptoms of the disease in mice into cloned pigs and dogs. Likewise, says Insung Hwang, a transgenic beagle at Sooam that carries a gene related to Alzheimer’s disease shows hallmarks of the disease. Researchers at the institute have cloned this beagle 18 more times and are waiting to see whether these dogs also develop the symptoms.

Sooam is also expanding its repertoire of species. It has already cloned coyotes (Canis latrans) using dog eggs and dog surrogates.

Roughly 50% of the funding for Sooam now comes from government grants, which includes 3 billion won (US$2.8 million) over three years from Gyeonggi province, Seoul’s neighbour, for two cow-cloning projects, according to Insung Hwang. In 2012 and 2013, the Rural Development Administration contributed nearly 190 million won for the interferon project and 140 million won for transgenic animal models of metabolic disease.