Image source @ Visual China
Text | Intelligent Relativity, author | Detached
Last week, Lady Gaga went out filming while her dog was taken away by gangsters while walking, and the dog walker she hired was shot. Desperate, she offered a reward of $500,000 on social media sites in hopes of retrieving her dogs Koji and Gustav, who had been abducted by gangsters.
Lady Gaga's grand scheme has caused a lot of discussion, some netizens think that finding dogs at such a high price is ridiculous, which may promote the crime of extortion targeting celebrity pets; many pet owners have said that they can understand her feelings.
Lady Gaga's case is more special but not unique. Compared with the past, the status of modern pets in the minds of owners is indeed becoming more and more important. Many people have developed deep relationships with pets they have kept for many years and regard them as part of the family. In the face of pet aging and departure, it is often difficult for owners to accept.
Thus, the business of "pet cloning" was born.
<h2>Controversial technology</h2>
It has been more than two decades since the emergence of the world's first cloned sheep, Dolly, but the technology has been controversial on an ethical level.
The principle of biological replication is to extract somatic cells from the animals that want to replicate, obtain their DNA genetic information, and implant them into unfertilized eggs through cell nuclear transfer technology, and induce the two to fuse, conceive and differentiate with electric shocks to form embryos. The surviving embryos are then implanted into the surrogate mother, and the individuals who are eventually born and copied are genetically identical.
In this process, in order to improve the success rate of replication, it is often necessary to make a large number of embryos and prepare as many surrogate mothers as possible.
With the advancement of technology, the survival rate of pet copy embryos has been greatly improved, reaching about 10 to 20%. However, the pregnancy of the replicant still requires a large number of animal eggs and uterus, in addition to the poor feeding environment, in order to ovulation and surrogacy, the experimental animals need to undergo multiple drug injections and surgery; the replication process is also easy to make the surrogate mother and embryo lose their lives or deformities. As a result, many have questioned that duplication technology kills a lot of life, treats animals as walking wombs, and violates bioethics and morals.
For example, Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist at the University of Colorado in the United States, once said: "Many people regard the controversy caused by the reproduction of animals as a matter of personal choice. But this choice is not entirely personal, because not only will pet dogs be affected, but there will also be more dogs dedicated to replicating experiments or industry that we can hardly see. ”
Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford University, argues that replicant animals are unethical because they have to suffer more than natural reproduction, such as injecting hormones into surrogate dogs during the process. In this regard, Che Myong Ko, a professor in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois, said that injecting such hormones can have a negative impact on the health of dogs, especially repeated injections.
In 2005, California tried to pass a bill banning pet reproduction, raising health concerns and fears that shelters would spiral out of control as owners turned to replicating animals instead of adopting them. The American Humanitarian Association pointed out that there are millions of cats and dogs in the world wandering around, and there is no need to copy pets. Humans can be accompanied by adoption and save some lives at the same time; not at the expense of the safety of dozens of their kind in order to obtain a "familiar" companion. But the bill was not passed and enforced.
<h2>From lack of attention to tens of millions of performance</h2>
Even if animal reproduction technology itself continues to draw criticism, the business path has not been smooth. Some companies are still relentless in their commercialization attempts.
In 2001, the California "Gene Storage and Cloning" company bred the world's first replica cat, opening up the pet replication market. As the world's first company to provide commercial cat cloning services, it closed its doors after successfully completing two orders.
At first, the company offered the replica cat service for $50,000, with only two customers signing up, but the price was later reduced to $32,000, and no new customers came to the door. The relevant person in charge said that due to the high cost of cloning pet technology and the narrow market, the company has "not been able to make ends meet" and cannot continue to operate.
With the advancement of science and technology, the success rate of animal cloning has increased a lot. In the 2005 replica dog experiment, a team of researchers at Seoul National University in South Korea put 1,095 fertilized eggs into 123 surrogate mothers, and only Snuppy stubbornly survived, with a success rate of only one in a thousand. According to the current pet cloning technology, the survival rate of duplicate embryos can reach about 10% to 20%.
The change of social concepts has made more and more people pay more attention to the "uniqueness" of pets, the demand for pet reproduction has also emerged, and companies with related technologies have once again "surfaced". The more famous are the American company ViaGen Pets, the South Korean Sooam Biotech Research Foundation and the Beijing Sinogene Biotechnology Co., Ltd.
For example, the well-known movie star Barbara Streisand ordered two replica dogs of Samantha after his beloved cotton-veiled dog Samantha died at the age of 14. Dorrit Moussaieff, iceland's former first lady, also pre-sampled DNA from her 11-year-old dog and sent it to the United States to be copied after its death.
Barbara also shared her feelings in The New York Times: "I am very depressed about the loss of my dear Samantha, after fourteen years of companionship, I just want to keep him by my side in some way." 」 If I could keep some part of him alive, like something from his DNA, I would have been more receptive to his departure. ”
In addition to the high-income people who have no financial pressure, some ordinary citizens are also willing to pay high fees for "resurrecting" pets. Tom Rubython, a journalist in the UK, sold two beloved cars to pay for a hundred thousand dollars in reproduction in order to revive his dog. Tom said he knows perfectly well that copying a dead pet "is not a rational decision," but he "has no other choice" for his dog-loving nature.
After her dog died of illness, Ms. Jin of Shanghai decided to pay 380,000 yuan in installments to purchase dog reproduction services from Sino Valley. She said: "It may be a lot of money, but whenever possible, I will try to do it in any way." I made this decision without consulting others, and I would not be influenced by others, because it was worth more than $380,000 to me. ”
However, today's pet copying technology is not perfect. Although cloning can ensure that more than 99.9% of the genes are the same, there is a random expression of the color gene of hair. If it is a flower cat, it is not guaranteed to be 100% consistent in appearance.
Furthermore, current technology is limited to physiological genetic replication and cannot retain the memory and personality of the pet. Due to the difference in living conditions and breeding environment between the clone and the main body, the pet personality may also change.
This has also become the reason why some pet owners refuse to copy pets, such as netizen @Renhe said: "The copied one is not the original one." Netizen @ Fish & Donkey & Green Carp said: "This is cruel to both the deceased pet and yourself."
Actress Barbara admits that each replica dog has its own personality, even if it is different from the deceased dog, but it does not mean that these replica dogs have no meaning to her: "You can copy the appearance of the dog, but you cannot copy its soul." Still, every time I look at their faces, I think of Samantha and smile. ”
In response, Sino Valley said that the next step will be to try to use artificial intelligence or human-machine interface technology to store the memory of pets and transfer them to clones.
In recent years, pet cloning seems to be gaining popularity. Since its establishment, South Korea's Xiuyan Biotechnology Research Foundation has successfully produced more than 1,200 replica dogs and opened a number of services such as dog somatic cell storage.
Sino Valley staff said that in 2018, the company cloned twenty dogs, and the annual performance was about two million; in 2019, the annual performance rose to 10 million. Until now, Sino Valley has received nearly 100 cloning orders, launched group buying promotions, and completed Series B financing last year.
<h2>More imaginative B-side and G-side markets</h2>
Although the number of orders and performance continue to increase, in terms of total volume, pet cloning is still a very niche business, and its business needs still cannot bear the company's high R&D and labor costs. Some companies have begun to apply technology to B-end and G-end markets, trying to carry out large-scale breeding and breeding of tool dogs, competitive animals (horse racing, bullfighting, etc.) or food animals, as well as the protection and rehabilitation of endangered animals.
Special tool dogs such as police dogs and search and rescue dogs can only use specific dog breeds, and it takes years and hundreds of thousands of yuan for a qualified police dog to breed, breed, select and train. If cloning technology is used, it can not only completely solve the problem of species selection, but also greatly reduce the time cost of training.
The most well-known "work" of the Ruxiuyan Foundation is the replica of the hero search and rescue dog Trakr, who searched for and rescued the last survivor in the 911 terrorist attack. His "descendants" are now living in the United States and continue to work as search and rescue dogs. In recent years, Xiuyan Foundation has also continued to receive orders from the United States, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries to copy police dogs or search and rescue dogs to continue the excellent dog genes.
In 2018, the Kunming Police Dog Base of the Ministry of Public Security cooperated with Yunnan Agricultural University and Sino Valley Company to breed the first cloned police dog "Kunxun" using cloning technology, and after nine months of training, "Kunxun" has passed the assessment and officially joined the police force, which has greatly improved the training efficiency of excellent police dogs. In August 2019, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau also cooperated with Sino Valley to breed six police clone dogs.
In terms of endangered animal protection, last December, The American animal cloning company ViaGen Pets & Equine partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore to clone the once-thought-extinct black-footed ferret, the first endangered species to be successfully replicated by scientists. This clone, if successfully mated and multiplied, could provide a unique genetic diversity for black-footed ferrets.
Not only wildlife conservation sites, but also some zoos have similar needs. The long-distance transportation of animals is inevitably accompanied by health and safety risks, and the number of rare animals traded is also limited by local regulations. The use of cloned animals can avoid such problems, and if the purchase volume is large, the market size will be immeasurable.
At the beginning of this year, just received millions of yuan of angel investment, the annual market revenue of more than 10 million yuan of Herman gene in 2020 to the cloning and reproduction of large animals and rare animals as the main service, such as the zoo "essential" African silverback gorilla (commonly known as the diamond orangutan) has a strict import quantity limit, the market is in short supply.
According to Theman Gene estimates, its cloning research and development costs are nearly 10 million yuan, taking two to three years; according to the marginal effect, the cultivation cost of the second one is only half a million yuan, but after the technology matures, the retail price of each one can reach 30 million yuan, and it is expected to have hundreds of sales per year. In addition to the wolverine orangutan, Seaman Technology has also signed a fixed-point cooperation project with the zoo for antelope and zebra, with a cloning order amount of up to 80 million.
In addition to animal reproduction, most of these companies also have gene editing technology and provide gene preservation services. Horse cloning services, such as ViaGen Pets, can improve horse racing performance while reducing the impact of inbreeding and genetic diseases. Currently, ViaGen Pets has successfully cloned thousands of elite racehorses, including ViaGen President Blake Russell's own stallion.
Through somatic cell cloning technology and gene editing technology, Heyman Gene has bred gene-edited disease model dogs such as atherosclerotic model dogs and autism model dogs for the study of human genetic diseases, cardiovascular diseases, rare diseases and brain science disease treatment.
<h2>epilogue</h2>
At present, there are only a few players in animal cloning and related industries, and the market is still a blue ocean. With the development of the pet economy, pet cloning services are slowly moving from niche to public vision. Countries around the world still do not have clear regulations on replicant animals, and commercial replicant pets are moving forward in an almost blank regulatory environment.
Although the technology can indeed help humans solve some problems, such as gene editing can be used for disease treatment research, somatic cell cloning can help restore endangered species, etc., the development of animal replication technology is still controversial to this day.
The creation of species was originally God's work, and if man robbed God of his life, would he be punished? Only time is left to answer. (This article was first published on the Titanium Media APP)