“Then, even with testing, you can only predict the best time to transfer the embryo.” It quickly became clear just how complicated, expensive, and inefficient cloning dogs actually was. “Basically, you have to have access to a large amount of dogs and wait for each one to show signs that they are coming into heat,” says Westhausin. Canine reproductive cycles are long, hard to alter, and random (anywhere from six to 12 months). He explains that the reason why dogs are much more difficult to clone than sheep, cattle, or even cats lies with their reproductive cycles-meaning how long their fertilization cycles are. Mark Westhausin was head of the Missyplicity Project and is now a professor at Texas A&M’s veterinary school. But as it turned out, canines were much more complicated than sheep.ĭr. In 1998, only 18 months after Dolly, University of Phoenix founder and billionaire John Sperling launched the Missyplicity Project, a multi-million dollar effort to clone his beloved border collie/husky mix Missy. Of course, farmers weren’t the only ones with an interest in cloning animals. If it was simply going to be eaten, that’s a very expensive steak. What has become clear, though, is that cloning animals for food production i s pretty uneconomical, potentially costing upwards of $20,000 per clone. Additionally, no label is required that states if the product is from a cloned animal. To this point, the FDA has issued a “voluntary” ban on selling products from cloned animals, meaning they are asking producers not to sell it though there’s no punishment or enforcement if they do. Despite the public concern, the FDA has continued to state that there’s no way to distinguish between a cloned animal and a naturally bred one. Several notable companies and grocery chains, like Whole Foods and Tyson Foods, have, at least in the past, declared that they wouldn’t sell cloned meat, dairy products, or even anything from the naturally-born offspring of clones. However, to this day, the public is cool on the idea of eating cloned meat and dairy products. In 2008, the FDA declared cloned cows safe for dairy production and human consumption. For example, if a dairy cow produces lots of good-tasting milk, what farmer wouldn’t want two of that cow? Or four? Or 40? Companies started cropping up catering to the genetic preservation and cloning of bovines, despite the known inefficiency of it. While cloning may still be taboo in the human world, the livestock industry has embraced it in the two decades since Dolly for practical reasons. “It would be desperately sad if people started using this sort of technology with people.'' We believe that it is important that society decides how we want to use this technology and makes sure it prohibits what it wants to prohibit,” said Wilmut. “We are aware that there is potential for misuse. In an interview on the same day that Dolly was announced, Dr. He made it very clear that the cloning process had been incredibly inefficient, time-consuming, and expensive, citing that it took 277 attempts to get one cloned sheep.
But he was realistic about where other’s minds may go-the idea of cloning humans, and what impacts that would have on our world, for one. Wilmut couched the breakthrough of cloning a mammal as the first step in solving genetic diseases. They said it could never be done and now here it is, done before the year 2000.” “It means all of science fiction is true. “It's unbelievable,'' a Princeton biology professor told the New York Times at the time. But Wilmut and his team shattered this perception. Prior to Dolly, many in the scientific community thought growing cloned cells like this into viable embryos was biologically impossible.
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