You couldn’t make a story like this up. Lou Hawthorne, the guy who was previously involved with an operation called Genetic Savings and Clone (that’s him on the right with cloned dogs), teams up with Hwang Wook Suk — the central figure in one of modern science’s epic frauds — to auction off dog cloning services. The opening bid is $100,000. And they’re calling the operation Best Friends Again. It almost sounds like the plot to a Charlie Kaufman film.
And the funny thing about all this (OK, one of the funny things) is that Snuppy, the cloned dog, was just about the only thing that Hwang didn’t lie about.
Of course, even if you can clone your pup, that doesn’t mean you’re getting him back, as Art Caplan highlighted today for Bloomberg:
“People believe they’re going to get their pet back through cloning, but the new cloned dog won’t know the old pet’s tricks … It’s a false promise to say you can get your pet back.”
Others are saying that there’s more at stake than dissatisified pet owners. Groups such as the Center for Genetics and Society are warning this could open the way for human cloning. Said CGS’s Marcy Darnovsky in a press release, “Many people consider pets to be part of our families. If we get used to cute cloned puppies, will some people expect cute cloned babies next?”
-Greg Dahlmann
photo: Best Friends Again