Cloning Your Pet
 

I was thinking this is a wonderful thing to do if you can afford it and we cannot. In our case it would cost $200,000. However, at the end of the video they mention possible abuse to lab animals. This would be a deal breaker for us even if we could afford it.

What do you think of this?

MSN Entertainment -

Human burn victims and others could benefit unfathomably if $200,000 or more from numerous donors were put toward research and development of replacement skin:

Burns

Each year in the United States, 1.25 million burn injuries require medical attention. Ten thousand people die every year of burn-related infections. The good news is that, in recent years, survival statistics for serious burns have improved dramatically. Twenty years ago, for instance, burns covering half the body were routinely fatal. Today, patients with burns encompassing 90 percent of their body surface can survive, albeit sometimes with permanent impairments.

Burn-induced skin loss allows bacteria and other microorganisms to access the warm, moist, nutrient-rich fluids that course through the body, while at the same time it provides a conduit for the rapid and dangerous loss of fluids. Hence, replenishing skin lost to severe burns is an urgent matter in the care of a burn patient. When a patient has lost 80–90 percent of the skin as a result of direct contact with scalding hot liquids, flames, chemicals, electrical current, or radiation, two immediate tasks come to the fore.

First, a burn surgeon must remove the burned skin, then the unprotected underlying tissue must be quickly covered.

Laboratory-Grown Skin Cells

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Howard Green of Harvard Medical School conceived a method for growing a type of human skin cells called keratinocytes outside of the body.

The product that eventually resulted from Dr. Green’s work, called Epicel, is used to treat deep wounds that require grafting (skin replacement), such as occurs with severe burns. However, since Epicel replaces the lost epidermal layer only, it works best in combination with something that restores the dermal layer of skin. Epicel is not an artificial skin, but rather a method in which new epidermis is “grown to order” in a laboratory from surgically harvested skin cells taken from an unburned area of the patient. Products like Epicel are termed “autologous” grafts, meaning that the source of the epidermal graft material is taken from skin of the same patient who receives it.

Artificial Skin

In severely burned patients who have little or no remaining skin, artificial skin is an extremely useful material not only to cover and protect the wounded area, but to promote re-growth of natural skin instead of scar tissue......"

Skin Replacement

Find an animal shelter and adopt

We used to joke about cloning our dog (He was perfect!! :) ), but after he was gone, and it was time to adopt a new buddy, we didn't even want to consider a look alike dog.

That's the point of cloning you would have the same dog with the same personality. I'm thinking when we put our dogs down it may have been easier it we could have cloned them. We still miss them and it will be hard to find two dogs with personalities like they had. One day we will get 2 more and I'm sure we will grow to love them just as much.

I found a dog that looks quite a bit like our recently passed Sport. Beau has quite a different personality. It does not seem to me that you would ever get the same personality as that is more a product of environment rather than genes. Sport was Sport because of his life history and then instincts.

If it were "affordable" and you would get the same personality, we would have cloned our first golden in a heartbeat. Nothing against our second golden. He's a gem. But that first beloved dog... sigh.

However, I have to agree with ilovetv that the cloning $ is better spent elsewhere. I have two family member burn victims--one fatal, one not--whose circumstances point to the benefits of skin cloning.

I certainly agree there are MANY better ways to spend a few hundred thousand dollars.

A loss of a pet is devastating for most people and for those with a lot of money cloning could ease the grieving process. It's not anything I would do, but I fully understand why others would.

Me too, tippy. Now if they bring the price down--say, $24.95--I'm in!

I'm not sure I agree. I think the grieving would be the same and could be eased by another, non-cloned, pet as well as the cloned one. Hard to know for sure just how alike the personality would be. I understand cloning and know it's basically the same animal, but still, you would KNOW it wasn't the same pet.

Who knows...., and at $200K, I'll never find out!!

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If I had the price I would clone my dog in a heartbeat

Never! Never! Never! There was only one Bart and that was him!

I look at his urn every day and look at my collection of his pictures that I set up and that is my Bart.

There is no way you can ever clone your pet - or anyone else. How would they be able to clone his/her personality or traits?

Z

Thank you. I screwed the whole post up. The accompanying text was, "If it looks like Bear, acts Goofy like Bear and has Bear's sense of humor, I'm all for cloning!" Somehow I deleted that when adding the pic.