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It may not be premature ageing that is the issue so much as whether more conventional failures happen at a higher rate in cloned animals, and thus lead on average to shorter lifespans. There are relatively few cloned farm animals in existence, so it is difficult to say about longer term issues. Dolly is unique whether a problem like Dolly's arthritis is actually cloning or just a random effect. Roslin have a cloned sheep a year older and a year younger than Dolly who do not have arthritis, but these were not made from somatic cells. There would need to be several examples before a pattern were established. Roslin and PPL have other cloned sheep (although not from somatic cells) a year older and a year younger which do not have arthritis.
It's easier to see in mice because they have shorter time spans. Some cloned mice have been shown to die significantly younger than non-cloned ones, but since cloning in mice is rather different from larger animals, no one knows how general this would be.
Variation in species is considerable. Cloned primates and dogs have so far proved impossible, but PPL Therapeutics have produced quite a lot of cloned pigs and thus far pigs show almost none of the problems seen in sheep or cattle.
The company GSC which cloned the cat Cc are pursuing genetic analysis of the cloned embryo at the blastocyst stage to check whether there are defects against a normal animal. Techncially it soulds like a good idea, it would seem rather unlikely that this one method of detection would solve the problem. We don't know what all the relevant imporinted genes are nor how they work in combination, so what's a normal baseline? But however laudable the notion of reducing the failure rate, this initiative represents instrumental logic of a technical fix which will not solve the deeper ethical objection to cloning pets.
GSC view of the ethics of animal cloning displays a common fallacy in the following opener from their ethics page.
It is a classic statement of the ethical fallacy known as gradualism - the assumption that because (usually in the scientists' rather narrow terms) it is a logical step from what went before it is little different ethically. The fallacy is that one step can push you over an ethical edge without realising it until you land at the bottom, as it were. Pigs hearts in humans and GM food are both examples where this logic was used and came seriously unstuck, because the proponents failed to relate the particular step to wider ethical norms.
Unlike AI and embryo transfer, which are manipulations in the detail of normal reproduction, nuclear transfer cloning of animals that normally reproduce sexually is a wholly artificial act with no correspondence in nature. In the light of the intrinsic value of all animals, regardless of whether suffering and welfare problems were overcome, we have argued that animal cloning would not normally be justifed, except in special circumstances where it enabled something of great moral value that could be achieved in no other way. GSC's ethical code provides no statement as to why, against a general trend to reduce experimentation involving animals, the company considers the activity of cloning pets to be ethically justified.
One example we consider acceptable is Roslin's original application, which was not for producing clones as such but to use the nuclear transfer method to enable better way of genetic modification for pharmaceuticals in the milk of farm animals to save human life. Another might be if cloning enabled a greater understanding and treatment of serious animal diseases, or perhaps to save an endangered species, although this seems unlikely to be a practicable on the scale that would be needed. Pig cloning for xenotransplantation is more controversial because of its other ethical and practical problems.
By comparison with these, cloning a pet ranks as an essentially cosmetic application which is not morally justified. Just because someone is rich enough to pay does not make it morally justified, and indeed suggests a trivialisation of embryo science in diverting skills and knowledge away from meeting serious ethical needs on to something that for many would represent an excessive commodification of the animal.
We would also oppose the use of cloning for more efficient animal production, for example for clone a prime breeding stock or to obtain greater reproducibility of cuts of meat. This would carry the mass production industrial logic too far into the realm of living creatures. These are not just identical widgets on an assembly line. Not everything we can do with animals is necessarily justified in the interests of efficiency.
This page was created 7 April 2002
