I happened to catch a show last night on TLC called "I Cloned My Pet." It followed three people who had chosen to have their pets cloned. Cloning technology has progressed to the point where a Korean lab can clone your dead pet - although it costs $50,000, and can take several months before it is successful.

 

Unfortunately, the show focused on the lurid "aren't these people bonkers" aspect of the story. Just like everything on TLC these days. (Remember when TLC stood for "The Learning Channel"?) Doubly unfortunately, in my opinion the show ended right when things were getting interesting.

Cloning creates a genetic carbon copy of your pet. If you are imagining an adult version of your pet, so was I! I was a little surprised when I realized that the cloning company's customers were going to be receiving puppies. Although it's pretty obvious when you think about it. 

 

To clone your pet, the scientists basically take a dog ovum, empty it out, inject it with 100% of your pet's DNA, and get the process started. Then they implant the egg into a surrogate mother dog who will (hopefully) carry the egg to term. By this process, a genetic copy of your pet is born - its genes are not mixed with those of the egg, nor with the surrogate mother.

 

The show ends as the three customers receive their puppies. It seems clear that the new owners are headed for disappointment, based on their apparent beliefs that cloning is able to essentially reincarnate their dog. 

 

Every adult creature is a product of both nature and nurture. With dogs, "nature" certainly plays a bigger part than it seems to in humans. Just look at how the retrieving urge is bred into retrievers, or the herding urge into herding dogs. 

 

However, "nurture" plays a part, too. Your adult dog is a product of all of its experiences, the places and times where it lived. Although all three owners had raised their original dogs from puppies, each of them were much different people then. The Asian man, for example, was (by his own account) a gangbanger headed for a violent death. The Staten Island woman was still a girl living at home. And the prisoner - heartbreakingly - probably won't even be able to be there for the puppy years at all.

 

Certainly a cloned dog is going to be very similar to the original. But not entirely, and it's wrong to place such high expectations on a poor little puppy. I wonder how their stories will play out over the years?