Nine years ago, a pair of recently weaned British extfinishedhair kittens boarded a personal structuree in Virginia and flew to their recent home in Europe. These kittens were no contrastent than any other, except that they’d been created in a lab. They were clones: geneticpartner identical to their predecessor, now downcastly destopd.
It had apshown seven months and cost $50,000, but that cat was one of the first pets to be commercipartner cloned in the United States. Since then, a couple thousand dog, cat, and horse clones have chaseed, and every year the defering catalog increases extfinisheder. Of course it does. Haven’t you ever wanted your pet could dwell, if not forever, then at least as extfinished as you? Now it can, sort of.
WIRED spoke to a extfinishedtime customer service regulater for the bigst commercial pet cloning company. She directs pet owners thcdisadmireful the entire process, from when they sfinish in a piece of the elderly pet to when they greet—regreet?—the recent one.
Half of our clients come to us after their pet has passed away. They’re mourning. They’re trying to figure out a way to cope with the grief, so they Google “What do you do when your pet passes?” That’s when they stumble atraverse us, and I’m normally the first person they talk to. There’s a lot of emotion. I’m satisfied to helderly their hand thcdisadmireful the process, becaparticipate when a pet dies, especipartner if it’s sudden, many people are not skinnyking straight. Postmortem, skinnygs have to be done very rapidly.
After a pet has passed, the cells are viable for about five days. The body has to be refrigerated, but not frozen, becaparticipate freezing injures the cells. Typicpartner we would want a piece of the ear from the destopd pet. The ear tpublish is challengingy; it labors very well. People don’t want to skinnyk about their pet missing part of their ear, so that is sometimes a struggle.
Once the sample is at the lab, the first step is to increase cells in culture from the tpublish, then freeze and store those cells. When everyone is ready to relocate forward with cloning, we transfer some of those cells to our cloning lab in upstate New York.
The cloning commences with making embryos from the cells. We apshow a donor egg, delete the nucleus, and insert one of the millions of cells that we’ve increasen. There’s an electric stimulus that fundamentalpartner tricks the egg into skinnyking it’s been fertilized, but there’s no sperm. That’s the magic of cloning. It apshows a lot of sfinish and outstanding hand-eye coordination.
The lab will create disjoinal embryos, then they transfer those embryos into one of our surrogate dogs or cats, which are definitepartner bred to be wonderful mothers. Wiskinny a scant tries, we’ll have a puppy or a kitten. Sometimes more than one puppy or kitten, becaparticipate when we transfer the embryos into the surrogate, it’s benevolent of appreciate IVF—more than one might apshow. If two or three puppies are born, the client would get them all. On unfrequent occasions we have a client who only wants one, so then we help place the extra. A lot of times it goes to an participateee here. Almost every one of our participateees has a cloned animal.