Re-Pet a Reality

tigerdarklord writes "The Sci-Fi concept of pet cloning has become a commercial venture. Genetic Savings & Clone now not only offers genebanking for your pet (alive or recently dead), but a full service cloning shop. Although they started by producing two clones of the CEO's cat, they have now produced their first commercial clone for a woman from Texas. GSC has modified their cloning procedure to overcome the resemblance issues demonstrated when the College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M, created CopyCat. The technology looks promising but the $50,000 price tag will prove to place the service out of the reach of most pet owners."

Re:More money than brains I guess

[nwbvt]

"... and they get a pet that looks like their deceased pet yet isn't. "

It actually may not even look like their pet. Often appearance is not identical even with clones, such as in calico cats.

You're getting confused...

[lxt]

"Why do you think the first thing the Scottish scientist cloned was a sheep?" ...look, it's the Welsh, not the Scots...the Welsh! :)

Go on! Mod me flamebait!

Dolly problems

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Dolly the cloned sheep was much celebrated, but developed arthritis early ask Google for "dolly arthritis". There is some speculation about this, but one is that the DNA slowly fall apart due to aging and therefore the cloned animal is "pre-aged".

If this is the case then that kitten you had cloned from your aging cat will start costing a lot in vet bills and will die at an early age.

Telomeres

[some guy I know]

There is a kind of "buffer" at the end of your genetic sequence that slowly decays over your life

They're called "telomeres [google.com]".