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A Dog's Life
A DOG'S LIFE
When my beloved dog, Homer, was dying of cancer this year, my father
asked me whether I had considered cloning him. This was just two months short of the announcement this month that scientists had succeeded in cloning a cat.
I have to admit that I had secretly harbored the fantasy of cloning
Homer when he first became ill. How could I ever part with this
extraordinary dog, who sang to classical music and had humanlike
intelligence? How could I resist the urge to cheat death?
I told no one that I had checked out pet cloning on the Web. It seemed seductively simple: all you had to do was obtain a tissue biopsy from your pet and have your veterinarian send the sample to the company.
For about $1,000 the company would store the tissue in liquid nitrogen, with the pet to be resurrected by cloning at some future date for some hefty new fee.
Then I asked Homer's vet, a brilliant and enthusiastic animal
oncologist, what she thought of pet cloning in general. She must have
known what I was thinking and said, kindly, maybe someday in the future.
Long before the dream of cloning, some people seemed to be trying to
own the same dog over and over. When their pets died, they bought puppies of the same breed; sometimes the replacement dog was even given the predecessor's name. But similar as two dogs of the same breed may be in temperament and abilities, these owners never got a carbon copy.
Even while I checked the Web, I knew that cloning was a false promise.
Nature's own clones, genetically identical twins, who share the same DNA and are raised by the same parents, don't turn out the same.
Homer's clone would look like Homer and possibly even act like him,
but he would not be Homer. Homer was in essence the relationship, built over many years, of shared and unrepeatable experiences. Cloning could not recreate the most precious thing about him -- our bond.
I left no therapeutic stone unturned in treating Homer's bone cancer.
After radiation and chemotherapy, which gave temporary relief, I even gave him the new miracle drug for human cancer, Gleevec. Along the way, a cancer specialist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center read and analyzed his biopsy. He probably got better medical care than I'll ever get. But in the end, I had to let him go down to death.
And so I told my father no.
Cloning might produce replicas, but it can't bring about immortality.
The bonds between people and pets -- and those between people -- are
precious in large part because they are fragile and mortal.
-- Richard A. Friedman
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