Posted on 08/21/2019 7:57:41 AM PDT by Red Badger
Sinogene plans to sell cloned cats for £29,000
A Chinese company has announced it is planning a mass sale of cloned cats to the general public.
Sinogene, China's first biotech company to create cloned pets, is planning to sell the cats for around £29,000.
It is planning to target bereaved pet owners who have lost their feline.
The announcement comes after a scientist from the company cloned their first kitten named Garlic, born a month ago at the company's laboratory in Beijing.
Sinogene only revealed its existence this week after the animal got stronger.
The original cat, which supplied the cells for cloning, and Garlic are identical in appearance but have different temperaments, memories and personalities.
To enable the cloned cats to share the same memories with the original, the company is considering the use of artificial intelligence.
The company currently says it is targeting 100 to 200 orders this year but hopes to receive 300 to 500 annually.
A cloned cat's life expectancy is the same as any other cat, Lai Liangxue, Sinogene's chief scientist and a research fellow revealed.
Sinogene made headlines by cloning a gene-edited beagle in May 2017.
Then a month later it launched commercial cloning services.
It is currently cloning dogs by using a lab to remove the cells from a dog’s egg and then transplant cells from another dog.
The company's deputy general manager Zhao Jianping told Crime Russia there also plan to clone horses and carrier pigeons in the future.
Sinogene is also planning to expand services to eventually include gene editing.
Sinogene’s CEO Mi Jidong said: “We’ve discovered more and more pet owners want their pets to accompany them for an even longer period of time."
In 2014 a woman in Texas, US, became the world's first owner of a cloned-to-order feline, after paying biotech firm Genetic Savings & Clone Inc, $50,000 for a genetic duplicate of her dead pet.
LOL!..................
There was a story a while back that China was secretly cloning humans for military purposes.....................
Owning a cloned cat ( or a collection of them) will become one of the next “things” (displays of wealth) that the really wealthy use to distinguish among themselves and between themselves and the merely wealthy. I imagine $40k is not that much more than a high end pedigree in one of the more exotic breeds.
But the article points up the one shortcoming of the process as it stands now: the inability to transfer personality and memories of the old cat into the new. Once the scientists can figure out how to download and upload a mammal mind into a new body, cloning cats will become one of the least of our concerns.
“Reveal Party” will take on a whole new meaning. It will become the next new thing (and perhaps ultimate thing) to get a brand new gene-edited body to house your mind. The intermediate step to a complete human body to human body transfer is to convert the donor’s personality and memories into digital information and download it into a machine-based host. Too SCI-FI? There are Silicone Valley billionaires sponsoring research into downloading a human mind into AI right now.
The next big step biologically will be figuring out how to force the growth and maturation process to produce an adult form of the organism in relatively short order. Then you have to figure out getting the AI-hosted information into the new body. (Shades of the SCI-FI movie “The Island.”)
The NETFLIX “Altered Carbon” SCI-FI series dealt with some of the possible consequences if this becomes a reality (especially if it becomes widely accessible). The first episode played (with dark humor) with the problem of a being in a lower social tier and having to accept whatever body was available in the public pool.
Based on previous transitions of science fiction to science fact, if it comes to pass, it won’t be exactly like that. It will be better and it will be worse.
As for it coming to pass, that is a given considering the diligence and money being directed toward it. Ethical barriers don’t really exist in Russia or China. In the West, ethical barriers are a farce. Post-religion politicians no longer fear criticism from that quarter and academic ethicists are just top cover to allow researchers and developers to do whatever they want without annoying outside interference.
As long as they don’t clone my wife.
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