The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York killed more than 3,000 people and ushered in a new world order. That day, more than three hundred dogs worked together with their guides in search , rescue, recovery and therapy tasks at ground zero of the World Trade Center. Among them, there is one, Trakr , a German shepherd, who became especially famous and twice.
In the image, the Trakr clones.
First, because he found the last survivor of the attack alive in the rubble. And, years later, because he was chosen as the dog most worthy of being cloned in a pet contest organized by the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. Thus, in 2008, the Korean laboratory gave Canadian policeman James Symington five cloned specimens of his late canine companion.
The term cloning describes a variety of processes that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a biological entity – genes, cells, tissues, or even whole organisms. This is how the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) defines it. The copied material, which has the same genetic makeup as the original, is known as a clone. At present, when we talk about this technique, we usually refer to processes that start from somatic cell nuclei. In other words, “the use of the genetic information existing in the nucleus of a cell of an adult animal tissue, which is transferred to a previously enucleated recipient oocyte”, clarifies Javier Cañón, professor of Genetics at the Department of Animal Production of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
To understand each other, we are talking about Dolly the sheep. Indeed, this animal, which became a world celebrity after its presentation in society on February 22, 1997, was the first mammal to be cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer . In the procedure, the nucleus of an ovum was removed and replaced by that of another adult cell, which in this case came from the mammary gland of another sheep. The egg was artificially stimulated to divide and behave similarly to an embryo fertilized by the usual method, using sperm. This required 277 attempts, something the scientists described as successful.
Dolly’s birth sparked a whirlwind of debate. Several prestigious scientists rejected the work as a fraud. Ultimately, what was at stake was the question of whether this “experimental aberration”, as some called it, could be replicated in humans, with all the ethical implications that it would entail. Hence, just two years later, on January 12, 1998, the Council of Europe approved the first international standard that prohibited the cloning of human beings.
Despite initial skepticism, scientists around the world set out to clone animals of all kinds , from ferrets to oxen, horses and camels. Many times, simply, on a whim, as in the case of pets. And it is that, at present, more and more people who, in the face of the loss of their dog or cat, turn to cloning companies to order an exact replica – or not so much, as we will see – of the animal, as a form alternative of coping with the duel. Of course, it is necessary to have a good checking account, since the process costs from 20,000 euros for a cat, double if it is a dog . Therefore, it is not uncommon for us to learn of the existence of this miracle of science through famous people, such as Barbra Streisand. In 2018, the singer revealed in an interview with Variety magazine that her dogs Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett were clones of Samantha, a former pet.
The first scientific project for the production of dogs was developed in the United States in 1997 under the name Missyplicity . The marriage of millionaires Joan Hawthorne and John Sperling dedicated a good part of their fortune to trying to create a copy of their dog Missy, a mix of husky and border collie, but a viable clone was never obtained. It would take a few years, until 2005, for a group of 45 researchers from Seoul National University in South Korea to successfully clone a dog for the first time in history. Snuppy, a black Afghan hound, was born after more than a thousand tries. Curiously, in addition, he was recloned ten years later with three new pups.
The leader of those researchers, Hwang Woo Suk, is the visible face of Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, the company that we mentioned at the beginning of this report and that is also behind the first cloning of a dog for commercial purposes. Lancelot, a labrador retriever, came into the world because his owners, Americans Edgar and Nina Otto, missed their previous pet. Not surprisingly, the motto of the Korean company is “We not only clone dogs, we also heal broken hearts.”
The first cloned pet, however, was not a dog, but a cat , which came to brighten Christmas 2001 for its owner thanks to the collaboration between Texas A&M University and the Californian company Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. As later genetic tests showed, Copy Cat was an exact copy of her mother, although no one would tell from her appearance.
Years after that feat, the pet cloning market is growing in countries like China , where cats are becoming increasingly popular. And that the first Chinese feline clone, Garlic, was created not long ago, in 2018, by Sinogene. The success, in part, is also due to the fact that legislative barriers are minimal in this country; in fact, a large part of the population considers that cosmetic experimentation on animals, for example, is not abuse. In general, on the other hand, there is no legislation that limits the investigation of these techniques in animals, “another thing is the permits that must be requested from the bioethics councils,” says Cañón.
In 2015, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban the cloning of livestock in the EU and to prevent food from clones or their descendants from third countries from being put on sale – which is safe, according to a report by the Food and Drug Administration US, the FDA. However, the use of this technique for research, the conservation of rare or threatened species or the use of animals to produce pharmaceutical or medical devices is not opposed. Spain has not yet entered the pet duplication market, but there is a company focused on the equine world, Embryotools. Its scientific director, the Portuguese researcher Nuno Costa-Borges, participated in the first successful cloning of animals in Spain, mice that were born in the laboratories of the University of Barcelona in 2009.
When asked what is the point of cloning pets if they do not have a veterinary interest – let us also think about the number of dogs and cats abandoned in shelters – Javier Cañón is clear about it. Let’s say, for example, that a cow provides ten thousand liters of milk a year, but that there is a specific breed that produces fifteen thousand. In cases like this, the use of cloning as an assisted reproductive technique is totally anecdotal because it has too low an efficiency for the cost involved. And it is that the efficiency of cloning is reduced for all species : it ranges from 5% in sheep to 19% in horses. Furthermore, following the previous example, the same objective could be achieved with techniques such as artificial insemination.
“We can say that, currently, the contribution of this assisted reproduction technique in the selection programs of the main species of income animals – domestic animals raised for food production – is marginal. A technologically feasible procedure is not necessarily economically feasible. However, in pets, precisely, the least relevant is the economic justification. It is a personal matter in which money matters little, ”explains Cañón.
Perhaps due to the fact of being able to afford it financially, many times people who turn to science to order a replica of their favorite bug are not aware that the result can be very different from the original . This is what happened to Barbra Streisand, who in the same interview in which she revealed that her two dogs were clones also declared: “They have different personalities […]. I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have Samantha’s brown eyes and seriousness. “
With Garlic, the first cloned cat in China, a company outside Sinogene had to check if its DNA matched the original due to the owner’s disappointment when they found that he was missing a black spot on his chin fur. And Copy Cat, the world’s first cloned pet, did not even remotely replicate the orange spots on the fur of the calico cat from which it came, Rainbow.
But why? The fact that two individuals are genetically equal does not imply that they are physically equal, because the genotype –set of genes– is not the same as the phenotype –set of physiological, morphological and behavioral characteristics and that they are the result of the relationships of the individual with the environment. During pregnancy, embryos can be affected by something the surrogate has eaten or by hormones in her body. Later, environmental factors can determine the susceptibility to certain pathologies or even the character of the animal.
The UCM expert explains these differences with a metaphor. In this type of cloning, one starts from already developed, differentiated cells, which must be reprogrammed. “You have to carry out a series of processes so that the DNA returns to its original state, as if it were a book that has all the letters, but lacks periods, commas and accents.” The punctuation marks are equivalent to diet, stress, pollution, maternal care, medications and in general any factor that can influence that, in the end, some genes are expressed and others are not. Hence, scientists sometimes present cloned animals as twins born at different times, which are not the same because there can be a lot of unforeseen events during pregnancy and after delivery.
The detractors of these techniques, including many entities dedicated to the defense of animals, describe it as inhumane, due to the suffering it causes to surrogate mothers. In addition, they denounce that in the world there are millions of dogs and cats waiting to be adopted and that many end up receiving euthanasia because they cannot find anyone to adopt them , so they defend that the resources should be used in the care of animals that already exist.
In this sense, cloning, perhaps, could be justified in the case of animals in danger of extinction or already extinct, as has been done for two decades. Thus, in 2001, a Massachusetts-based company, Advanced Cell Technology, was the first to replicate a threatened species, specifically a gaur or Indian bison, using cells from a male who died years ago. The animal, however, died within two days of a bacterial infection.
On the other hand, de-extinction is the technique that makes it possible to re-breed a specimen or even revive a species that has already disappeared. This is what the Spanish scientists achieved who, in 2003, managed to rescue a bucardo, thus marking a historical milestone. Celia, the last specimen of this subspecies of ibex, died in 2000, but her DNA was preserved. After many tests, they found the system that would make their cloning feasible: with hybrid goats of domestic and mountain type as surrogate mothers. Of the 786 cloned embryos, 208 were tested in 57 mothers, of which only seven became pregnant. Eventually, only one delivered the baby to term, but the little goat was born with breathing difficulties and died within ten minutes. Never again has the bucardo been reborn.
At present, cloning techniques are also being used to manufacture products of high biological value . For example, to improve the composition of milk, increasing the concentration of casein in transgenic cows. Or to achieve high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, very beneficial for human health, through cloned pigs.
Thus, despite expectations, the use of genetically modified animals for agricultural production has not played a very relevant role. Pet replication is also marginal. But the field in which the implementation of these technologies is beginning to have great success is in biomedicine . According to Cañón, we are making progress in research and understanding of pathologies such as diabetes, cancer, sclerosis or cystic fibrosis thanks to the fact that these tools allow us to use animal models with the same genetic basis.
