
Why I Cloned My Dog - dr_
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/style/barbra-streisand-cloned-her-dog.html
======
WheelsAtLarge
Dog cloning is brutal. Companies have to go through many many attempts before
they get a good result. Who knows how many attempts they had to try before
they got the result they wanted. They go through all of this and ultimately it
is not the same dog.

I wish she would have gone to the pound to save a life there. I hope cloning
doesn't become a trend.

[http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/cloning/qa/questions_ans...](http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/cloning/qa/questions_answers.html)

[https://io9.gizmodo.com/5949612/why-cloning-is-a-terrible-
wa...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/5949612/why-cloning-is-a-terrible-way-to-bring-
your-pet-dog-back-from-the-dead)

~~~
oh_sigh
She know's it is not the same dog. From the article:

> You can clone the look of a dog, but you can’t clone the soul. Still, every
> time I look at their faces, I think of my Samantha...and smile.

Why or how is cloning brutal? I assume that the cloning attempts generally
fail before any kind of viable multicellular life?

~~~
WheelsAtLarge
Some dogs are born and have to be euthanized since they don't meet the results
they want. It's a hope and see process. They hope it will be good but there's
no way to know until you have a real dog in many cases.

------
helloworld
Cloning a dog seems benign, but I suspect that, before long, people will be
cloned, too. There are certainly creepy possibilities, e.g., "The Boys from
Brazil," which imagines Hitler clones, but also thought-provoking scenarios,
e.g., allowing parents to clone a child who died in an accident. What a brave
new world we're entering!

~~~
oh_sigh
Hitler clones would be interesting. Hitler didn't have a great early life -
would he have been different if he grew up in a healthy household with two
loving parents?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yes. A recent twin incident proved that nurture plays a surprisingly large
role, larger than was expected by the investigators.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-
america-35220779](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35220779)

~~~
mtgex
I'm not sure, the article doesn't mention any of that.

It actually tries (weakly) to claim the opposite, with statements like "Carlos
and Wilber both had very similar white mobile phones" and "We are a little bit
more ego-centric, bigger flirts."

Nothing about nurture playing a role though.

~~~
DoreenMichele
It's the first article I could find that referenced the twins in question. But
researchers said they were surprised how much impact upbringing had. Unlike a
lot of twins separated at birth, these were raised in very different
socioeconomic circumstances.

Project about them: [http://drnancysegaltwins.org/bogota-twins-project-
gallery](http://drnancysegaltwins.org/bogota-twins-project-gallery)

The best reference I can currently come up with is this comment by tokenadult
who has a longstanding interest in twin studies:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10100109#10100644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10100109#10100644)

------
gilbetron
$50k to clone according to the company's website - take that money and put it
to a far better use.

~~~
_rpd
Her net worth is $340 million. $50k is not a huge amount for her.

~~~
ridgeguy
No, not for her.

But $50K could be life-changing for lots of people.

$50K donated to a battered women's shelter would probably do more good than
$50K spent cloning a dog.

And I speak as one who has a dog whom I love so much that if I had Streisand's
wealth, I'd be seriously tempted by the cloning option, but wouldn't do it.

If tech progress brought the cloning cost down to $1K, I'd rethink the matter.

~~~
noonespecial
_> If tech progress brought the cloning cost down to $1K, I'd rethink the
matter._

Rich people splashing $50k on it when its brand new is exactly how this comes
about.

Lots of people with "too much" money buy stupid cars you can hardly sit in and
ridiculous mechanical watches that barely keep time for far more. This seems
pretty tame to me.

~~~
gilbetron
Yeah, that's actually a thing I was thinking about. Rich people doing "stupid"
things actually finances companies to improve and advance so that "stupid"
things become affordable. $50k is dumb. $1k, I'd think about. $300, I'd do
today for my 14 1/2 year old "bullet" (pitbull+basset) mix dog :)

------
glibgil
> Why I Cloned My Dog

"Because I have money"

------
tabeth
I'm probably just out of touch, but what's with the obsession with dogs,
anyhow?

> I was so devastated by the loss of my dear Samantha, after 14 years
> together, that I just wanted to keep her with me in some way. It was easier
> to let Sammie go if I knew I could keep some part of her alive, something
> that came from her DNA. A friend had cloned his beloved dog, and I was very
> impressed with that dog. So Sammie’s doctor took some cells from inside her
> cheek and the skin on her tummy just before she died. And we sent those
> cells to ViaGen Pets in Texas. We weren’t even sure if the cells would take.

I mean, imagine if someone said this and it was a _human_. You'd look at 'em
like they're insane [1].

[1] By the way, this is literally a Black Mirror episode, S02 E01 (edit:
Thanks for the correction!)

~~~
threatofrain
I'm not sure how entitlement is relevant here, except to excessively shame
her. Entitlement is the view that people owe you something; it's not like this
person had the moral expectation that society owed her anything with regards
to her pet.

------
nkkollaw
I read about dog cloning a few years ago.

I _believe_ it was done in China.

One of the company's promises was that they would not charge for failed
attempts at cloning.

That lead me to think that they clone dogs and kill them if they don't look
like they should and keep doing that until they're happy.

Is this true?

~~~
gwern
You almost certainly read about the South Korean company. (I'm not sure if
there are any Chinese ones yet, it's plausible, but they must get less
publicity.) Killing dogs would probably cost too much since the yields won't
be too great, and more importantly, they have to deliver both quickly and as
puppies. No one pays ~$50k for a clone of their dog or cat and doesn't take
delivery as a puppy/kitten. How do you know they will grow up to not look like
they should? They're just cute little balls of fluff.

~~~
nkkollaw
Well, they said there would be multiple attempts, so I assume they're looking
for eye color, patterns in the fur and stuff like that?

~~~
gwern
I think by multiple attempts they mean the viability of the cloning process
itself. It's a tricky process and a lot of the cells or embryos will just die
on you for various reasons. This is true even of human IVF: if you harvest 5
eggs from a woman, she'll be somewhat lucky to get 1 child born. This is
because some of the embryos are clearly abnormal, die while stored, when
implanted don't 'take' and result in a pregnancy, or the pregnancy ends in a
miscarriage or stillbirth, so on average you need 5+ eggs to start with and
many women will have to do 2 (or even more) IVF cycles to get their child.
(And you can lose them after birth too! As OP notes, the runt of the litter
died.) Similarly with cloning: you just lose lots of embryos along the way
from 'cell sample' to 'happy panting healthy puppy delivered to new owner'.

------
RickJWag
I'm not one to tell Barbra how to spend her money, but I think she should stop
portraying herself as a textbook liberal and champion of the 99%. It doesn't
ring very true.

~~~
masonic

      champion of the 99%
    

In practice, she's most comfortable with the 1%.

[http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_bdc5ada0-dd0e-5c38-b...](http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_bdc5ada0-dd0e-5c38-b923-34902fc6fe82.html)

Hence the term, "The Streisand Effect"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)

