Week 10 - Bring in the clones

Is cloning pets a good idea?

Well, if people have more money than they know what to do with, I suppose it is better than them going out an buying hummers or adding more square footage to their house.  I guess if the owners realize they are not getting the same pet, it might be an option for a family that has neutered a pet but now want offspring.

How does cloning effect our ideas of death?

This is really a fool's game. The clone is just a copy of the genetic material that created the pet. It is not the pet itself. Until we can clone all of the memories, history and thought processes of the cloned individual we still do not have Fluffy. Fluffy is still dead. On the other hand we do need to start thinking about what is life and what is an individual. I have read about the possibility of duplicating or downloading every thought and thought process of a human into a computer. we can't do it now. Our computers are still quite primitive. But what if it were possible 500 to 1000  years in the future? If my "mind" were downloaded into a computer, would that be me. Do I need my body to be me? Some of these futurist ideas are explored by Ray Kurzweil in a book called "The Singularity is near" http://www.singularity.com/ .

Would you clone your pet?

No. It is hard. I miss Fiji terribly. she slept in our bed every night for 16 years. We had a relationship with her, but a clone of her would not be her. First she would not look the same. Yes, the clone would probably still be a 9-pound, polydactyle calico, but she wouldn't look like Fiji. Being calico, different patches of black and orange would occur during her fetal development.

The clone wouldn't remember the games we played or special memories we shared. ah,,, you say I could teach the clone all the same things, but is that really the same thing. I could probably teach a cat from the pound some of the same things. you might say that i attribute too many memories to a cat. I remember things we shared.... like the time in her youth when, dog-like, she would jump in the car for a ride to the post office with me. Her adult self had already forgotten these tricks... so the memory is just in me, not in the cat. How do we know what their memory capacity is? Their minds are different than ours, but we often anthropomorphize their motives, feelings, thoughts and memories.

Maybe it is the mystery of what our companion animals think, that causes us to consider cloning. I could hope I could get Fiji back, just younger. It is somewhat less of a mystery what our human companions think. At least sometimes the human companions tell us their thoughts. No one thinks they can replace a child, a brother, a parent, a lover, a mate with a cloned human. Unless or until we can clone the mind, we cannot ever approach replacing a lost companion, human or animal. When we can clone the mind as well as the body then we will be in a scary realm of playing god. HMMM.... Ah.. the mind is the thing. If you could clone my mind and put it in a different body, I bet my mind clone would think it is me, even if the shell of the body  looked different.

On the other hand, in the future, ( for the super-rich) maybe we do not have to clone the whole pet. Maybe we just clone new kidneys, heart, and liver for our pet ; find cures for pet cancers and other aging processes and just keep the original Fluffy alive indefinately.

Other thoughts:

For more information on why cloning will not bring back the pet, see this Nova special on epigenetics. It talks about natural clones of human twins and how their gene expression changes over time, making the twins different. In other words, even clones are not identical. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/02.html  there is also a picture of a cloned cat that looks nothing like its mother/sister.

Food cloning
OK Cloning a pet is one thing, cloning our food animals is quite another. The biodiversity of our food is becoming more and more narrow. This is a very, very bad trend. At least there are some seed banks trying to preserve some diversity, but that is really not the same as biodiversity on the ground. Our apples are already clones. The fact that our turkeys can no longer reproduce in the natural way is disturbing. Most of our pork comes from artificial insemination as well. [I am not saying that artificial insemination is cloning, just that cloning would give the ag-industrial complex greater control over the "product"]. The multitude of pig and turkey varieties that went to market a hundred or less years ago have been reduced to 1 or 2 marketable varieties, made for mechanized production, processing and marketing. They are no longer animals but instead are manufactured, fairly-uniform products for the supply chain. (well, the animals still think they are animals and probably still don't liken living on CAFOs. Oh here is an evil thought: Taking a page from the book  "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", we can program or breed animals not to care about living on a factory farms.)  For a cheesy television version of the "dish of the day" check out this You-tube: "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" .