Who owns clones

Cat cloning services were offered in and researchers are now trying to crack dog cloning. To date, only one lab, that of the disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Woo Suk-hwang, has succeeded in cloning a dog, Snuppy, an afghan hound who celebrated his first birthday last month. On board with GSC is a scientist from the lab. According to Mr Carlson, people approach the company to have their pets cloned for different reasons.

Sometimes the pet is an unusual mix of breeds and sterile, and cloning is seen as the only way to replicate it. But sometimes people just want to see a dead pet's legacy continued.

Testimonials posted on GSC's website suggest that sometimes clients believe their clone is a carbon copy of their old pet. According to GSC, Dan, a fortysomething investment adviser, wrote in an email on receiving his cloned kitten, Little Gizmo, last year: "She is exact, exact, exact in all of her mannerisms, habits, traits and personality. It is the kind of comment that could mislead potential clients into thinking cloning will resurrect their pet rather than replace it with a genetic copy, according to Bruce Whitelaw, a cloning expert at the Roslin Institute.

Professor Kraemer, of the original Texas team behind Cc, says research into cloned pigs in which their characters were assessed compared with an age-matched group of non-related pigs, showed the spread in behavioural differences was as great among clones as among other pigs. Part of the reason is that the scientists in GSC's lab must receive tissue samples within five days, and they must be taken quickly if the pet has just died. The company sends out the equivalent of a coolbox to a nearby vet who takes the samples.

Another hurdle to foreign clients is that many countries have laws prohibiting the import of animals unless they have received injections for diseases such as rabies. Mr Carlson says the company is planning to overcome the logistical hurdles by extending the business overseas. Expanding the business to include dog cloning is high on the wishlist, but cloning is still notoriously tricky.

The creation of Copycat by the Texas group took place after more than 70 failed attempts to get cloned embryos to lead to a successful pregnancy. According to Prof Kraemer, even with the lab of top scientists Prof Sperling has gathered, profits are likely to be elusive. Thirteen years ago I was given a kitten, a siamese mix, and after a while I named him Kitamus.

They go to the company that can show it had begun work on the project first, leaving this case murky until the patent office conducts a further examination of the evidence. The financial upshot of the patent decision is that the company owning the rights to the method would then be able to license the process to other cloning firms. Those rights could certainly be lucrative, especially if the nuclear transfer technique covered by patent number 5,, remains the dominant cloning process.

But scientists continue to search for new techniques, some of which could fall outside the scope of the patent — or might engender new patent disputes. And for the cloning firms lacking the patent, the real money may not lie in selling animals in bulk quantities, but the genetic material belonging to top-of-the-breed individuals.

Still, cloning firms can and do produce revenue by charging customers for each animal they produce. And that's still the likely outcome, since nuclear transfers of cell materials tend to yield two live births. Moreover, scientists have raised serious questions in the last year about the health of cloned animals, many of which turn out to be overweight. Additionally, recent cloning attempts with monkeys have fared poorly, while many scientists doubt the claims of Italian fertility specialist Severino Antinori, who said this year that a woman under his supervision is pregnant with her own clone.

If scientists are able to produce animals more efficiently, that price range will go down. Adds Gillespie, "It becomes an issue of how many animals there are at different price points.

At those prices, a significant portion of the nation's estimated 60 million pet owners may yet want to buy clones to replace those departed cats and dogs. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. Top Stories. BIO is the main political and lobbying arm of the biotechnology industry.

To date it has opposed restrictions on cloned and genetically modified pets. They complained that the "regulatory language adopted by the Commission appears to criminalize the process of transgenesis for these animals" and "effectively ban[s] the commercial or recreational use and possession of transgenic aquatic animals.

Concerning the GloFish, the industry asserted that lack of evidence of harm was enough to justify an exception to the ban, and cited E. Wilson's Biophilia as attesting to the "social and medically therapeutic benefits of companion animals" whom advances in biotechnology are claimed to benefit. In other words, we should genetically modify pets because it will improve their "health and well being.

BIO's director of animal biotechnology supports efforts to create genetically modified pet cats free of allergens and has speculated about "a dog that isn't as susceptible to hip dysplasia, an ailment common among German shepherds and Labrador retrievers that's associated with over-breeding. It remains to be seen what position they will take on AB These labs were deciphering the secrets of embryos and had a particular interest in how eggs are formed.

Surgeons in New York have successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a human patient and found that the organ worked normally, a scientific breakthrough that one day may yield a vast new supply of organs When desperate parents are looking for medical treatment for their kids, especially their autistic kids, they often do two things: They look up information about a program at Duke University, and then, in short order, they go to GoFundMe.

Main navigation. Search Search Donate Subscribe. Who is Behind the Pet Cloning Industry? By Center for Genetics and Society. John Sperling Sperling has invested millions in companies he established to create cloned and genetically modified animals, and has a major stake in opposing any legislation that would ban these practices.

Sperling's Companies Biotechnology has become a major focus of Sperling's activities. A review of The Great Divide in the New York Times concluded that it gave some Democrats "demographic, poll-based vindication for the strategy they have been pursuing all along: forget the focus on class conflict that defined the party in the old days, and rebrand the Democrats as the voice of enlightened industry versus dirty industry; of sensitive, artistic billionaires versus loathsome, racist billionaires Animal Biotechnologies.