Deja ewe or eww: expansive animal cloning raises some difficult questions

How does animal cloning work, and could human cloning become a reality soon?

This came to mind again because of a recent piece in The Atlantic. Apparently, animal cloning is now so common that there are even races of horses that are clones of each other. Camel cloning is also a thing.

Animal cloning expands

Here’s the cloning piece: Inside the Creepy, Surprisingly Routine Business of Animal Cloning.

I guess you can have your meat and clone it too?

There are some astounding quotes from this piece.

For example,

“The top-ranked polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, has more than 100 clones of his best horses and once won a match riding six copies of the same mare at different points throughout the competition.”

And then there’s this:

“If the clonee is dead, the company requires a sliver of ear—“For some reason, that grows really, really well,” a ViaGen technician told me—which should be sliced off within five days of the animal’s death and kept chilled but not frozen to avoid being damaged. Exceptions can be made. Once, a customer sent in the room-temperature scrotum of a sheep that had been dead for nearly a week.”

So the cloner is the one doing the cloning and the clonee is the one being cloned.

I highly recommend The Atlantic piece as it’s one of the most intense reads of the year that I’ve encountered.

Animal cloning history & ViaGen

ViaGen, referring to ViaGen Pets & Equine, is a dominant company in the animal cloning space.

There are a few others including outside the U.S.

Ian Wilmut cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first cloned mammal. Should Wilmut should have shared the Nobel Prize with Gurdon and Yamanaka? I think so.

I wrote a decade ago about expanded dog cloning by Hwang Woo-Suk, more well known for a human embryonic stem cell cloning scandal. Earlier in 2012, it appears he cloned the first ever dog, Snuppy. Apparently dog cloning was relatively quite difficult and researchers produced an untold number of failures, which is kind of an awful thing to think about.

While these days animal clones seem generally healthy, firms that do animal cloning must address a variety of ethical issues. For example, what is the source of the surrogate female animals that will have cloned embryos implanted for pregnancies? How are those surrogates treated and what is their quality of life? Female animals must also supply the eggs.

How often does implantation of cloned embryos lead to miscarriages or sickly animals being born?

I don’t believe there’s been another transparency and discussion of these issues.

How long until we see attempts at human cloning?

While humans have done all kinds of odd things related to animal production over thousands of years, the cloning could have sort of a yuck factory. Recent animal cloning polling suggest most people are still not comfortable with it.

There’s another bigger issue here too.

I still think all of this animal cloning could enable eventual human cloning.  See: If you lost a loved one, could you turn to human cloning?

My recent STAT column about Japan giving permission for researchers to make human embryos from stem cells briefly discusses potential unintentional enabling of future human cloning too.

Thinking about possible human cloning, we have to keep in mind the controversial and, frankly, I’d say kind of sad history of cloning animals of various kinds all over the world. Especially early on, probably thousands of dead or developmentally messed-up animal embryos were produced. Probably hundreds of puppies and other animals too.

You might think something like, “Oh, it’d be so great to have a clone of my dog”, but you should consider the history leading up to that possibility.

It’s a sobering thought, especially when thinking about human cloning.