Old Pets As New...

It's been ages since I posted. Maybe I should be using that Twitter thingy...

Anyway, I recently heard about a company in South Korea cloning puppies for people who have lost their beloved pets. This seems at first sight to be a great idea, the first of what I'm sure will become a long succession of "undo buttons" on life, but I'm not so sure.

Does anyone remember Dolly the sheep, cloned by the Roslin Institute in 1996? Dolly died early of a progressive lung disease found in much older sheep. The underlying problem is that genomes age, and as they do they become less able to repair themselves, leading to age-related diseases such as cancer, arthritis and so on. If you take the genome of, say, a five-year-old animal and create a newborn clone from it, that clone starts with a genetic age of five. It ages prematurely.

I can't help thinking that the joy felt by owners who have their dead pets cloned using today's techniques will be short-lived as they realise they may have created a replacement condemned to suffer an early death.