Shenrancaijing original
Author | Wang Min
Edit | Golden Dragon
"Cloned cats" are also married!
Recently, Dr. Zhao Minghui of the College of Life Sciences of Qingdao Agricultural University openly gave the school's clone cat "Ping An" marriage in the circle of friends. According to reports, the British long-haired cat somatic clone offspring "Ping An", which was bred by the team on December 24, 2020, is currently 8 months old.
The "marriage" incident has made many people focus on "pet cloning".
When it comes to "pet cloning", most people probably feel a little far away from their lives. However, the mention of the world's first cloned sheep in 1996, "Dolly", a case written in a biology textbook, will surely evoke people's memories. Nine years after "Dolly" was "born", a South Korean scientific research team cloned the first hound. By around 2007, cloned dogs had begun to be commercialized in South Korea.
Around 2017, a number of domestic companies have begun to provide commercial pet cloning services, and cat and dog cloning have become two more common commercial cloned pet species, with prices ranging from 100,000 to more than 400,000.
Despite the "sky-high price" of a single order, there is no shortage of pet lovers who are willing to pay the bill. Just in July this year, the topic of "Shanghai grandma spending 180,000 cloned pets" once rushed to Weibo's hot search. His grandson said that his grandmother's dog will die soon due to old age and illness, and in order to let the dog accompany her in another form, he and his grandmother finally decided to spend 180,000 yuan on cloned pet services after consultation.
The pet cloning track, which has been commercialized, has attracted an influx of enterprises, and the number of users who choose this service and the outside world have also increased. On the one hand, the public is still unclear about the process of pet cloning and the results achieved. Can pet clones really be exactly the same? Can you reproduce your character and soul? Are cloned pets as healthy and long-lived as normal animals? On the other hand, pet cloning involves pet surrogacy, which faces moral and ethical pressures that may cause harm to a large number of pet surrogate mothers, and is therefore resisted by animal caregivers.
After communicating with the witnesses of pet cloning, the executives of pet cloning companies and relevant scientific researchers, it was found that pet cloning, which seemed to be "sky-high price" and "money", was just starting out, and it was moving forward in doubt and challenge.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="14" > "resurrection" pets: ranging from hundreds of thousands to 400,000</h1>
"How much does it cost to clone your pet dog?"
"What is it like to clone a deceased pet and respawn it?"
"Dead dog, cloned back home."
During the epidemic in 2020, Liang Xuan brushed Douyin and was hit at once after seeing the relevant video introducing pet cloning. Her long-standing wish was that her pet would always be with her, and she immediately found the contact information of the pet cloning agency for detailed consultation.
Shen Yan learned that pet cloning requires a lot of time and money, but the cloned pet, not only can not "reproduce" the memory or soul, the personality and behavior are also very likely to be greatly different, and even in appearance, it may not be exactly the same as the original pet, and can only be regarded as identical twins.
Even if cloning is successful, the longevity and health of cloned pets are somewhat controversial. Cloned sheep "Dolly" only lived to 6 years old, to half of the life of ordinary sheep, because of the geriatric disease "lung infection" and died, although British scientists later used cloned dolly sheep stored genes cloned 4 "new Dolly", life expectancy exceeded 6 years old, but also did not completely dispel people's doubts about cloned animals prone to infection with diseases and premature aging.
Source / Network
Until the second half of 2020, Liang Xuan finally decided to carry out "pet cloning", so he first contacted the relevant staff of the pet cloning enterprise for cell preservation.
Like Liang Xuan, there are not a few people who choose to store cells first. In January 2021, Internet celebrity Zhang Mofan posted a video on Douyin, recording the process of her pet dog dumplings that accompanied her for ten years and spending 19,000 yuan on gene retention, that is, the process of skin epidermal tissue extraction.
Extracting cells is the first step in pet cloning. Shen Yan learned from a pet cloning agency that the pet dog cloning process is: extracting cell samples, extracting cell lines, constructing cloned embryos, and implanting surrogate mothers to develop into new individuals.
In detail, cloning a pet dog requires first taking a cell sample from the pet, usually a small piece of skin, using the cell sample to establish a somatic cell line, and at the same time selecting a batch of female dogs in a suitable state of estrus to collect spare oocytes. Subsequently, the nuclei of mature canine oocytes are removed, and canine somatic cells are transplanted into canine oocytes to construct cloned embryos. The cloned embryos are then transferred into the surrogate female dog, and the surrogate female dog can be cloned into a pet dog after pregnancy. The cloning process for cats is basically similar to that for dogs.
About two months after the cells were extracted, the staff of the cloning agency told Liang Xuan that the clone could be started after the successful establishment of the system. Liang Xuan did not hesitate and promised to "start immediately."
Before Liang Xuan cloned her pet dog, Zhang Yue in Shanghai spent 380,000 clones of her dog, Nini, in 2018. Zhang Yue said in an interview with Gu Yu that if there is no clone, he may be depressed. Although 380,000 was all her savings at the time, the money was spent to make her happy. Nowadays, Zhang Yue often posts photos of her cloned dogs in Xiaohongshu. The new nini at the age of 1 and the old nini at the age of 15 can no longer tell the difference in appearance.
A pet agency marketer told Deep Burning that due to different genes, the probability of differences in appearance of cat clones is much greater than that of dogs. It is well-established in the industry that the first commercial cloned cat in China appeared in July 2019, when Huang Yu of Pingyang, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, spent 250,000 yuan to successfully clone his cat "garlic". However, there are differences in appearance between the cloned version and the original version, the most obvious being that the original "garlic" has a small black hair on the chin, while the clone "garlic" does not.
After all these years, the price of pet cloning is still very expensive. After comparing a number of cloning institutions, it was found that cloned cats started at 100,000 in China, and cloned dogs ranged from more than 100,000 to 200,000 or 300,000 or even more than 400,000.
At the same time, there are more and more people who have difficulty accepting that pets have left them and desperately want to leave traces of pets. In this case, price is often the last factor for pet owners.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="74" > a single "sky-high price", can pet cloning make money? </h1>
In the huge prospect of the pet industry, the unit price of customers starting from 100,000 yuan, is pet cloning really popular?
According to the "2020 China Pet Industry White Paper", the number of urban dogs and cats in China exceeded the 100 million mark for the first time in 2020, and the consumer market size also reached 206.5 billion yuan, an increase of 2% over 2019. Correspondingly, the "sky-high" pet cloning track is still in its infancy.
Zheng Shidong, CEO of pet cloning company Heman Gene, said to Shen Yan that the current market penetration is less than 0.1%, even if there is demand and ability, but many pet owners do not understand pet cloning.
In May 2017, Sino Valley, the earliest domestic organization to do independent pet cloning, successfully cloned a beagle using gene editing, and commercialized the business every month or two.
In other words, the domestic pet cloning technology has only been commercialized for more than 4 years now. However, according to its introduction, it has successfully cloned more than 100 pets so far. The company has a strong momentum in the commercialization of domestic C-end pet cloning, and its main business is to do cat and dog cloning for consumers, as well as genetic testing and cell storage, and has completed a B1 round of financing of tens of millions of yuan in June 2020.
At the same time, the track has attracted more and more players to join. According to the understanding of deep combustion, in addition to Sino Valley, there are currently domestic companies such as Boya Xiuyan and Ximan Gene to provide pet cloning services.
Boya Xiuyan is mainly oriented to the C-end, which was jointly established in 2014 by Boya Group after it invested in the Korean pet cloning agency Xiuyan Institute of Life Engineering, and has always needed to rely on Korean technology in the early stage. According to market personnel, its cloned cat business can now be carried out independently in China, with a price of about 100,000 yuan. The pet dog cloning business needed to ship cells to South Korea for cloning at a price of 480,000, but it was interrupted due to the epidemic.
Seaman Gene's business is mainly B-end, mainly providing services such as cloning silverback gorillas to zoos, and has completed angel round financing. Zheng Shidong mentioned that The current C-end business of Ximan Gene is only about a dozen orders per year, mainly recommended by acquaintances, and has not yet formed a scale.
Source / Pexels
So, can "sky-high" pet cloning make money?
Zheng Shidong analyzed to the deep combustion that scientific researchers and cloning surrogate mothers are the two major costs that pet cloning institutions need to consider. Under the current technical means, the survival rate of embryos is about 10%, and only one of the 10 embryos can survive. At present, Theman gene does not raise experimental dogs, chooses to cooperate with large kennels, and researchers also cooperate with universities, this cooperation model is lighter, the cost of cloning a pet dog is about 100,000, and the profit per order ranges from 50,000 to 100,000. However, more than a dozen orders per year, the performance that can contribute is minimal.
Judging from the prices displayed in the Sino Valley Taobao store, the price of cloned cats is 249,000, and the price of cloned dogs ranges from small dogs such as poodles to large dogs such as Tibetan mastiffs and Akitas, ranging from 219,000 to 449,000. Mi Jidong, general manager of Sino Valley, said in an interview in 2019 that it is expected that the revenue of the year will be between 15 million and 20 million, but it has not yet made a profit. The majority of the cost is mainly in R & D investment, cloning fixed cost expenditure, personnel investment, etc., with the success rate rising, the cost may decline in the future.
An industry insider said that a large number of companies that undertake pet cloning will raise their own surrogate mothers, that is, experimental animals. Because pets have different times of estrus, only if the mother has enough to ensure that there are enough eggs to meet the order demand every month. Not only that, when the pet cloning agency and the customer sign the contract, they will generally set the delivery order time, and the agency will find multiple mothers for conception at the beginning in order to avoid accidents affecting the delivery of the order, so as to improve the success rate, which requires a sufficient number of experimental dogs.
According to Shen Yan's understanding, the Sino Valley, which mainly serves C-end users, is an independent breeding of experimental dogs, and there are currently about 2,000 experimental dogs. In general, an average of ten embryos will be transferred when cloning, and the surrogate mother will choose about three. Scientific researchers and market personnel are also recruited by the company independently, so the daily operating costs may be higher.
Pet cloning is an imaginative business, but the market is in its early stages and it's not easy for businesses on the track to make money.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="54" > inseparable from pet surrogacy, pet cloning controversy</h1>
From day one, commercial pet cloning has been associated with controversy.
The biggest question of C-end consumers is: "Is it worth spending so much money to clone pets?" ”
Most of the people who choose to clone pets are out of deep affection for pets. However, there are also many people on social platforms who have expressed the view that pet cloning is equivalent to just buying a similar-looking pet back, and the significance of cloning is not as great as imagined.
"Life, old age, illness and death are all things that should be accepted." Under Zhang Mofan's video, someone put forward this point of view. Although Zhang Mofan insists on giving the pet a cell storage first, more protection, and does not want to regret it in the future, in the video, her mother said that the pet dog dumplings are unique, and its memory and life traces are difficult to find in cloned dogs.
The second biggest controversy over pet cloning is a scientific ethical issue, and the most concerned is the pet surrogacy that pet cloning is inseparable from.
A lawyer told Shen Yan that according to the relevant laws and regulations of our country, surrogacy is an illegal act, and those who constitute a crime will be investigated for criminal liability according to law, but there is no clear provision for pet cloning and pet surrogacy.
Zhao Xingbo, a professor at the College of Animal Science and Technology of China Agricultural University, also told Shen Yan that pet cloning currently has no legal risks, but will face moral pressure.
Some animal activists have always resisted pet cloning. They believe that the commercialization of pet cloning is entirely to satisfy people's selfish desires. Consumers want an identical pet, but behind it sacrifice countless experimental animals. These experimental animals will not only be hormone-struck, but also undergo surgery again and again, and endure endless cage life.
Liu Yutang, a professor at the College of Wildlife Resources of Northeast Forestry University, told Shen Yan that pet cloning technology such as cats and dogs has been conquered, but the efficiency of cloning is also related to the quality and proficiency of technical personnel, if the technology is not mature or skilled, a large number of experiments are needed in the early stage, which will waste a lot of manpower and material costs. Among them, naturally, also includes the input of experimental animals.
In 2019, the cat "garlic" was successfully cloned, and the staff prepared nearly 40 cloned embryos, which were implanted into the bodies of 4 surrogate female cats, and finally succeeded in one.
Garlic (left) is cloned cat (right) source /network
In 2020, Liang Xuan began to determine the cloning schedule with the institution at the end of October, and by the end of December, he was told that the first embryo transfer had been carried out, but soon he was told that the transfer was not successful and the first cloning failed. In April this year, the cloning agency performed a second embryo transfer for Liang Xuan.
Liang Xuan considered that pet cloning may cause harm to the pet surrogate mother, so in the early stage, he agreed with the market personnel of the pet cloning agency that only one surrogate mother could be used for each embryo transfer, and after the final cloning was successful, he would adopt the surrogate experimental dog to keep the experimental dog from the cage and enjoy the rest of his life.
What Liang Xuan did not expect was that the institution used two surrogate female dogs privately during the second embryo transfer, and in the end, the cloned dog was not the normal birth that Liang Xuan expected, but was delivered by caesarean section without being told, and a total of multiple dog babies were cloned.
"Either you don't succeed or you have a litter," Mr. Liang said. The results of the cloning were very different from the previous agreement, and Liang Xuan had been psychologically difficult to accept. She couldn't ignore the dogs that were related to her dog and wanted to adopt them all, but what made it difficult for her to accept was that the agency was reluctant to let her adopt two surrogate dogs. The good offices of the two sides have been going on for three months.
The pet cloning business is tempting for merchants because of its sky-high price, but it is even more in the midst of controversy. Liang Xuan's experience also reflects, to some extent, that the pet cloning industry has not yet been fully standardized, and the supervision of the entire industry needs to be strengthened. While the pet cloning business is slowly rising, how to avoid the abuse of pet cloning technology is a topic that the whole society should think about.
*Image from Pexels. At the request of the interviewee, Liang Xuan is a pseudonym in the text.