Lancy at the Memorial Tree
A couple in Florida recently paid $150,000 to a San Francisco biotech company to clone their recently deceased dog. Because it’s illegal here, they cloned the dog in South Korea.
The picture above shows “Lancy” pulling at a memorial tree where his original was buried. I wanted to say “predecessor” to describe the original–and to some degree it is a predecessor–but not really, since they may technically be the same being (though maybe not, since twins are separate entities). Man, what a conundrum! Imagine paying $150k for a cloned dog. Imagine being a cloned dog standing right above your deceased original. Now that’s weird.
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I don’t want to be one of *those* who employ the “don’t play God” argument, but cloning used in this manner definitely gives me the willies. I love Prince Marshall lots and lots, and if anything were to ever happen to him, I would be devastated, but never irrational to the point of wanting to clone him.
Scientifically, I am intrigued by cloning… mainly because it can potentially answer questions regarding what is dictated by DNA and what isn’t. Yet, I am, like Akrypti, a bit weirded out by the idea of it. Even the idea of genetically altered vegetables gives me pause… I wonder why that is.
HAH! My ReCAPCHA words were: Fido grabs
Imagine being a cloned human standing over your “original’s” grave. Now that would be a unique form of self-reflection…
I eat genetically engineered/altered vegetables everyday.
The wonders of selective breeding.
Of course, that deals nothing with reading/writing DNA.
I think the biggest issue would be an outcome result of genetic manufacturing. For me, it seems to take away a lot of what it means to be a human – all the small things that we didn’t choose.
As far as playing god, I would like to weakly argue that the old monk Mendel was doing this long before the talk of DNA.
Oops. This is on cloning.
I wonder if the dog will have a shortened life span, or if they have figured out a way to prevent that whole chromosome splitting issue.
Oh, with this and all the medical operations that are going overseas now – I’m curious if the outflux of money has had much of an impact on our economy here. And in what way.
Jason – ah, yes, good old Mendel. He was my favorite biologist in high school.
As far as economy… I work in a medical school and we did lose a prominent stem cell researcher due to lack of funding, i.e. W cutting federal funding on SCR. She went to Europe. And her entire lab personnel as well as quite a few administrative staff lost their jobs. She also took her pharmaceutical funding with her, i.e. U.S. pharm companies funding the research she’s doing in Europe, therefore the $$ that would have paid for the dozens of jobs here went to the lab personnel in Europe.
This is, of course, on a smaller scale but as we all know, economy tends to have domino effect on all of us.
RE: what it means to be human… I don’t know what really makes us human but my reCAPTCH words were “I’m pencil”. There’s my existential staement for the day.
Conversation with Hubby:
Me: Honey, if I died, would you clone me?
Hubby: Yes.
Me: What?! You would?!
Hubby: Yeah, but only if your memory was preserved. Otherwise what’s the point? It’d be a totally different person, just somebody who looked like you.
Me: I don’t think my memory would be preserved.
Hubby: Then no. I wouldn’t.
And then we proceeded to talk about Battlestar Galactica, because we’re both BSG geeks.
Akrypti,
What if he could selectively clone memory? Your husband could clone you and then say, “But honey, you ALWAYS loved to do the dishes!”
By the way, somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else seen 50 first dates?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343660/
Cute, cute, cute movie!
B.