Even Tom Brady, the timeless American football champion, has cloned his dog and in the United States this has been talked about for days. Brady is especially famous, as he played 383 games in 19 seasons, also winning seven Super Bowls. Now he is retired and lives a normal life walking his dog in the park, like everyone does. But his beloved Lua, a Pit Bull crossbreed, died in 2023. Brady and his wife Gisele Bündchen, a Brazilian supermodel, could not overcome the trauma of the loss and decided to clone her: today they took Junie for a walk, just like Lua. Many American celebrities have lost cloned dogs: Barbara Streis and her beloved Coton de Tulear, Samantha; Chihuahua’s Paris Hilton, Harajuku; entrepreneur Barry Diller and his wife Diana von Furstenberg, Jack Russell, Shannon, and even Javier Milei, president of Argentina, made copies of the beloved English Mastiff, Conan.
Cloning a dog in America costs about 60 thousand dollars, but celebrities are always given a small discount. The announcement about Brady’s new dog was actually made by Colossal Biosciences, which had just bought Viagen, in connection with the historic cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996. Brady invested some of his money in Colossal, and so did Paris Hilton: perhaps for the two of them it was a kind of friendly exchange of goods.
However, pet cloning is becoming more and more common. In Europe there is a laboratory called Overclone in Spain, in Marbella, which accepts requests from every country. In China and South Korea, this operation is carried out routinely and it was the Koreans who cloned a dog for the first time in 2005.
PROCEDURE
The procedure is quite simple: a tissue sample is taken from the animal you want to clone, frozen and when the time comes, the DNA is implanted into a neutral embryo, to serve as a surrogate mother. A replica of a cat costs 50,000 euros in Europe, while a dog costs 55,000 euros, but for a thoroughbred horse the price reaches 300,000 euros. The cases of Gem Twist, show jumping champion, and Cuartetera, famous in polo, are well known. But this is discussed with great caution: in the world of horse racing there is a lot of money at stake and the secret of the development of cloning techniques is not divulged. In a release announcing that Brady had a new dog, Colossal Biosciences revealed that they had cloned 15 species, including the endangered black-footed ferret, the increasingly rare Przewalski’s horse on the Mongolian plains, and even the dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus) from Games of Thrones, which has been extinct since the Pleistocene. Maybe other animals that we would love to miss will soon be cloned, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex and the saber-toothed tiger.
REACTION
Many are calling for an end to this genetic manipulation, which makes life just a product and no longer a gift. In addition, cloned animals are more susceptible to disease and have shorter lifespans. Dolly only survives for six years, compared to 12 years in normal sheep. Professor Samuel Gorovitz, who specializes in medical ethics, told the New York Times that people who clone pets are actually committing self-deception. “There is no danger to the cloned animal, nor is there any initial danger to the resulting animal. But the new pet will not be your previous beloved pet. The clones are actually just 99.9% genetic twins, but they don’t remember the past and don’t inherit their predecessor’s personality: they can instead develop a new personality that is very different from the lost animal. Is it worth it? An old sci-fi movie comes to mind, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which tells the story of mysterious pods arriving on Earth that killing humans by taking their features. And worried relatives tell their friends: it looks like him, but believe me, it’s not him anymore.
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