By Fariha Fawziah
Does anyone else ever wish they had a twin? With the way that cloning research is going, you might someday get your wish. Cloning has existed in nature since the dawn of life. From asexual bacteria to ‘virgin births’ in aphids, clones are all around us and are fundamentally no different from other organisms. A clone has the same DNA sequence as its parent and so they are genetically identical.
We all remember “Dolly” the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Animal cloning from an adult cell is much more difficult than from an embryonic cell. So when scientists working at the Roslin Institute in Scotland produced Dolly, the only lamb born from 277 attempts, it was a major news story around the world. Recently, singer Barbra Streisand cloned her dog. Streisand explained that she was so devastated by the thought of losing her 14-year-old Coton de Tulear, Samantha, that before Samantha died, she had her veterinarian collect DNA cells from Samantha’s cheek. They sent those cells to a Texas company for cloning. Streisand explained to The New York Times that it would be easier to let Samantha go in death if she knew she could keep a piece of her alive. In fact, she kept two pieces of her alive in that the cloning produced multiple dogs. Now she has three puppies, two from Samantha’s DNA and a third from the breeder from whom she’d originally adopted Samantha. She says that third dog is Samantha’s distant cousin. Her dogs are named Miss Fanny, Miss Violet, and Miss Scarlett.
Barbara Streisand and friend.
Now you might wonder, how does cloning actually work? In reproductive cloning, researchers remove a mature somatic cell, such as a skin cell, from an animal that they wish to copy. They then transfer the DNA of the donor animal’s somatic cell into an egg cell, or oocyte, that has had its own DNA-containing nucleus removed. Researchers can add the DNA from the somatic cell to the empty egg in two different ways. In the first method, they remove the DNA-containing nucleus of the somatic cell with a needle and inject it into the empty egg. In the second approach, they use an electrical current to fuse the entire somatic cell with the empty egg. In both processes, the egg is allowed to develop into an early-stage embryo in the test-tube and then is implanted into the womb of an adult female animal.
Ultimately, the adult female gives birth to an animal that has the same genetic make up as the animal that donated the somatic cell. This young animal is referred to as a clone. Cloning a pet is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. The United States government recently decided that it’s safe to drink milk and eat meat that comes from cloned animals. The decision has ignited arguments about human health, animal rights, and the difference between right and wrong.
Last week, I interviewed some of my classmates to get their opinions on this phenomenon.
Anndy Serrano said: “I think that cloning pets is not a great idea. It creates a lack of the genetic variation that makes up other pets, [which] leads to less diversity among them. It’s better to stick with what we have.” Genesis De Los Santos also responded, saying: “I think that cloning pets is inhumane. Yes, you might want to have a piece of your pet to stay with you forever, but you also have to let go sometimes. It is not healthy to grieve by basically getting the thing you lost [back] again. That’s not how life works.”
As society gets comfortable manufacturing cloned pets, the medical and reproductive industries may move on to cloning humans— especially children who die young—or to resurrecting beloved parents through cloning. Additionally, someone with high status and wealth could leave instructions in their will to pass all their money to his or her clone. This may sound like science fiction, but normalizing cloning could subvert the legal protections of marriage and inheritance by establishing “clone dynasties” to preserve one person’s power and influence for generations. Ultimately, it could result in creating a society with different laws and systems than what we have right now.
Overall, the cultural impact of cloning is something we need to think about as individuals, and more importantly, as a society. Cloning of pets is no longer just laboratory science; rather this technology is now becoming widely available. So as a community, we have to come up with ethical decisions on the matter of cloning—whether pro or con.