Name: The False Promise of Cloning Your Pet
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Departed pets can now live on through reproductive cloning. But many owners have been surprised to find that genetics aren’t everything—Fluffy the second turns out to be an animal all its own.

Cloning has come a long way since Dolly the sheep, but it still has limits.

Departed pets can now live on through reproductive cloning. But many owners have been surprised to find that genetics aren’t everything—Fluffy the second turns out to be an animal all its own.

The False Promise of Cloning Your Pet

False Promise of Cloning Your Pet

Cloning has come a long way since Dolly the sheep, but it still has limits.

Tech & Engineering

The False Promise of Cloning Your PetPublished: August 16, 2022Narrator: This cat is a clone.When Chai, a young cream bi-colored rag doll cat died unexpectedly, Kelly Anderson sent skin samples to a company in Texas to make a genetic replica of her cat.Kelly Anderson: I just wanted to carry on a piece of Chai. I never wanted to bring her back from the dead. And Belle is literally a piece of her. They share the same genetic makeup,Narrator: But genes might be the only thing the two cats have in common.Kelly Anderson: Just couldn't be any more different.Definitely more outgoing, more comfortable around people and other animals.Just everything that Chai never had the chance to be.Narrator: Cloning has come a long way since Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, cloned from a cell from a mammary gland of 6 year old female sheep.And it’s not just pets that are being cloned now—cows, pigs even horses have been cloned.In agriculture, cloned animals are used primarily for breeding, to increase preferred characteristics in a herd And scientists hope reproductive cloning may one day even help bring back revive endangered species.But like with Chai and Belle, personality isn’t always inherited; scientist don't fully understand the role of genes in forming personality. Robert Klitzman: The evidence suggests that many things about us are in fact cognitively half genetic and half other stuff, environment rearing, etc..Narrator: And like humans’, animals’ personalities are sometimes shaped by lived experience.But some high-performing animals, like police dogs or prized polo ponies may pass on their some abilities to their clones.Katrin Hinrichs: Because part of their behavior could be innate in their DNA. Part of it could also be how they responded to how they were trained.Katrin Hinrichs: I talked to some horse breeders once that said, well, we actually have an advantage if we have a clone and we know the original horse because we now know this foal has the potential to be a champion and we will do everything we can for this foal.They could theoretically be better than the original.Narrator: Clone means “copy”—and in vertebrates cloning is done by basically swapping genetic information in the nucleus of a mature egg cell with that of a desired animal from the same species.Jose Cibelli: It is actually very incredible that this works.Narrator: But there a still a number of challenges to this kind of research.For one, the success rate is pretty low.Jose Cibelli: In most cases it's about 20%. So you still have to transfer five cows to get one healthy calf. And you may get you actually may get good pregnancy rates. You may may get 50% of animals to get pregnant with clone. But in the first two months when you get losses and then you get some losses right before birth, which sometimes the animals are born but they don't survive and thrive. Narrator: It starts with the nucleus, the part of the cell that contains the genetic instructions for building and operating an organism, packaged in the form of chromosomes. Katrin Hinrichs: You take the you get a mature oocyte that knows how to make an embryo take its chromosomes out, put the chromosomes from a cell of your donor animal in, and then you give it a signal you've been fertilized and off the site goes working with these chromosomes to make an embryo.Narrator: Cells located under the skin are commonly used in cloning because they are fairly easy to collect and readily replicate but they are not the only kind of cells used. Jose Cibelli: Animals have been cloned from all types of cell types in the body. Practically, people have tried everything and everything seems to work a different efficiency.Narrator: And in theory, this works because every cell in your body has the same DNA but they just all don't use every part of it.Katrin Hinrichs: It's like if you had a huge blueprint for a 200 story building and you're plumbing the bathroom on the northeast corner of the 148th floor. You go through the blueprint, you find out where the instructions for doing that.Narrator: So to produce a clone, researchers basically need to reprogram those signals that tell the cell which part of the DNA to use need to be reprogrammed.Jose Cibelli: We're still working on how to remove that, all the proteins that are around the chromosomes to erase the memory of the original cell. We need to make sure that the memory is erased and then we can reestablish an a memory that is unique for an embryo.Narrator: Once new genetic information is in the egg, scientists try to coax the cell to become an embryo in the lab. if that works, it’s implanted into the womb of a female, usually of the same species.One of the most common issues complications with producing a clone cloning that often prevents a healthy birth has to do with the development of the placenta.Jose Cibelli: All the mammals, they all have placentation issues. And then when placenta is not properly formed, you get issues that are complications in the cardiovascular system of the fetus. You have a lot of fluid retention and abortions are a common. Katrin Hinrichs: You'd think that that making the embryo, making the individual is the hard part. But there are certain aspects of how genes are turned on and off in the placenta that makes it even more difficult for the oocyte to get it right.Narrator: Because of some of the complications, it might take a number to attempts to produce a single healthy clone. And the burden placed on other animals during cloning procedures like, egg retrieval, implantation, and pregnancy, raises ethical concerns.Robert Klitzman: And so whether it's with horses or dogs or cats, maybe half will die at birth or shortly after birth. And they have major deformities and they're going to suffer. The the problem also of problems also arise because to make 30 or 40 or 50 cats pregnant also puts strain on those cats. So pregnancy is not a benign endeavor for a human or for a cat. So there are cats that may die through the pregnancy. So it's definitely putting a burden on a lot of different animals to produce one take home healthy animal.Narrator: And private companies that offer cloning services of pets, aren't always transparent about success rates.Robert Klitzman: So I understand people's attachment to animals, but I think we need to be concerned about what kind of risks and strains we're putting on the animals. And I think there's an ethical concern that comes up, given that there are millions of cats and dogs that are available for adoption every day.

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The False Promise of Cloning Your Pet

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