Kind: captions
Language: en
this cat is a clone
i just wanted to carry on a piece of
chai i never wanted to bring her back
from the dead
and
belle is
literally a piece of her they share the
same genetic makeup
when chai a young cream bi-color ragdoll
cat died unexpectedly kelly anderson
sent skin samples to a company in texas
to make a genetic replica of her cat but
jeans may be the only thing these two
cats have in common just couldn't be any
more different definitely more outgoing
more comfortable around people and other
animals
everything that chai never had the
chance to be
cloning has come a long way since dolly
the sheep was born in 1996.
cloned from a cell of a mammary gland of
a six-year-old female sheep
and it's not just house pets that are
being cloned now
cows pigs even horses have been cloned
cloned animals are used in agriculture
primarily for breeding to increase
preferred characteristics in a herd
and scientists hope reproductive cloning
may one day even help bring back
endangered species
but like with chai and bell personality
isn't always inherited scientists don't
fully understand the role of genes in
forming personality
the evidence suggests that many things
about us are in fact
cognitively half genetic and half other
stuff environment rearing etc and like
humans animals personalities are shaped
by lived experience but some high
performing animals like police dogs or
prized polo ponies may pass on some
abilities to their clones
part of their behavior could be innate
in their dna but part of it could also
be how they responded to how they were
trained
i talked to some horse breeders once
that said
well we actually have an advantage if we
have a clone full and we know the
original horse
because we now know this foal has the
potential to be a champion and we will
do everything we can for this full and
so you know that's a concept too they
could theoretically be better than the
original clone means copy and in
vertebrates cloning is done by basically
swapping the nucleus of a mature egg
cell with that of a desired animal from
the same species it is actually very
incredible that this works
but there are still a number of
challenges to this kind of research
for one the success rate is pretty low
in most cases it's about 20
so you still have to transfer five cows
to get a one healthy calf you actually
may get a good pregnancy rate but then
the the losses are at the beginning of
the pregnancy and then you get some
losses right before birth where
sometimes the animals are born but they
don't survive they don't thrive
it starts with the nucleus the part of
the cell that contains the genetic
instructions for building an operating
organism
packaged in the form of chromosomes
you get a mature oocyte that knows how
to make an embryo take its chromosomes
out
put the chromosomes from a
cell of your donor animal in
and then you give it a signal you've
been fertilized and off the oocyte goes
working with these chromosomes to make
an embryo
cells located just under the skin are
commonly used in cloning because they're
fairly easy to collect
but they're not the only kinds of cells
used
animals have been cloned
from all types of cell types in the body
practically people have tried everything
and everything seems to work
a different efficiency
and in theory this works because every
cell in your body has the same dna but
they just don't all use every part of it
like if you had a huge blueprint for a
200 story building you're plumbing the
bathroom on the northeast corner of the
148th
floor
you go through the blueprint you find
out where the instructions for doing
that
so to produce a clone
those signals that tell the cell which
part of the dna to use need to be
reprogrammed we're still working on how
to remove all the proteins that are
around the chromosomes
to erase the memory of the original cell
that we need to make sure that the
memory is erased and then we can
reestablish a memory that is unique for
an embryo once new genetic information
is in the egg scientists try to coax the
cell to become an embryo in the lab
if that works it's implanted into the
womb of a female usually of the same
species
one of the most common complications
with producing a clone has to do with
the development of the placenta
and when placenta is now properly formed
you get issues that are
complications in the cardiovascular
system of the fetus
you'd think that
that making an embryo making the
individual is the hard part but there
are certain aspects of how genes are
turned on and off in the placenta
that makes it even more difficult for
the oocyte to get it right
because of some of the complications it
might take a number of attempts to
produce a single healthy clone
and the burden placed on other animals
during cloning procedures and during
pregnancy raises ethical concerns
whether it's
with horses or dogs or cats maybe half
will die at birth or shortly after birth
and they have major deformities and
they're going to suffer problems also
rise because to make
30 or 40 or 50 cats pregnant also puts
strain on those cats so pregnancy is not
a benign
endeavor for a human or for a cat
so it's definitely
putting
a burden on
a lot of different animals to produce
one
take-home healthy animal
and private companies that offer cloning
services of pets aren't always
transparent about success rates
so i understand people's attachment to
animals but i think we need to be
concerned about what kind of risks and
strains we're putting on the animals and
i think there's an ethical concern that
comes up given that there are millions
of cats and dogs that are available for
adoption every day
[Music]
you