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(Photograph: Warren Umoh/Unsplash)
For many of us, the topic of cloning animals elicits memories of Dolly the sheep—AKA the globe's first cloned mammal. But cloning technology has seen its fair share of developments since Dolly's birth in 1996. These days, despite the financial investment, more than people are choosing to clone their dear household pets.

ViaGen, a Texas-based firm that purchased the intellectual property to cloning applied science in 1998, is in the business of helping individuals and families clone their pets. But it wasn't always that way. ViaGen originally aimed to better livestock breeding by "bypassing the genetic lottery" that produces high-value bulls and other animals, according to a new feature by the BBC. Then the company realized it could accuse pet owners a pretty penny to "salvage" their furbabies' cells (and upsell even more to really consummate the cloning process). ViaGen charges pet owners $1,600 to preserve a single pet's cells, while the near yr-long cloning process costs $35,000 per true cat and $l,000 per dog. Most clients, ViaGen says, just opt to save their pet'south cells in instance they tin afford cloning later in life—though enough clients are opting for consummate cloning to go on business booming.

Dolly the sheep. (Photo: Toni Barros/Wikimedia Eatables)

ViaGen's total number of cloned pets is said to be in the hundreds, though the company won't disembalm exactly how many animals it'southward produced. "It has grown so much since we start started this, and we're cloning more and more pets every year," a client services manager at ViaGen told the BBC. "We've got puppies being built-in every calendar week." Simply if pet cloning hasn't been floating toward the summit of your consciousness for a while, there's a reason for that: "We don't do a lot of advertising, a lot of information technology is passed on by give-and-take of mouth."

ViaGen (and similar cloning firms, like Sooam Biotech in Due south Korea and Sinogene in China) performs its cloning procedure by injecting a cell nucleus from the initial fauna into a donor egg whose genetic textile has been removed. The house so grows the egg into an embryo until that embryo can be safely planted into the womb of a surrogate parent. The upshot is an identical genetic twin, despite an actual age difference of upward to several decades.

Even celebrities are hopping onto the pet cloning bandwagon (though this comes as no surprise, given that they're the ones who can easily afford to practise so). Diane von Furstenburg and Barry Diller controversially had their tardily dog Shannon cloned dorsum in 2016, while Barbra Streisand used Viagen to produce two clones of her late domestic dog Samantha two years later. Idiot box personality Simon Cowell has also expressed interest in cloning his pups, though that was back in 2019, with no news on the subject since.

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