More People Are Cloning Their Pets Despite the Cost

ViaGen, a Texas-based firm that purchased the intellectual property to cloning technology 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 improve 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 charge pet owners a pretty penny to “save” their furbabies’ cells (and upsell even more to actually complete the cloning process). ViaGen charges pet owners $1,600 to preserve a single pet’s cells, while the nearly year-long cloning process costs $35,000 per cat and $50,000 per dog. Most clients, ViaGen says, simply opt to save their pet’s cells in case they can afford cloning later in life—though enough clients are opting for complete cloning to keep business booming.

ViaGen’s total number of cloned pets is said to be in the hundreds, though the company won’t disclose exactly how many animals it’s produced. “It has grown so much since we first 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 born every week.” But if pet cloning hasn’t been floating toward the top of your consciousness for a while, there’s a reason for that: “We don’t do a lot of advertising, a lot of it is passed on by word of mouth.”
ViaGen (and similar cloning firms, like Sooam Biotech in South Korea and Sinogene in China) performs its cloning procedure by injecting a cell nucleus from the initial animal into a donor egg whose genetic material has been removed. The firm then grows the egg into an embryo until that embryo can be safely planted into the womb of a surrogate parent. The result is an identical genetic twin, despite an actual age difference of up 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 do so). Diane von Furstenburg and Barry Diller controversially had their late dog Shannon cloned back in 2016, while Barbra Streisand used Viagen to produce two clones of her late dog Samantha two years later. TV personality Simon Cowell has also expressed interest in cloning his pups, though that was back in 2019, with no news on the subject since.
Continue reading

Elon Musk: SpaceX Will Send People to Mars in 4 to 6 Years
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk likes to make bold claims. Sometimes he comes through, and we end up with a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, but Musk also has a tendency to get carried away, particularly when it comes to Mars. The SpaceX CEO has long promised a Mars colony on an aggressive, and some…

190,000 Ceiling Fans Recalled After Blades Fly Off, Hitting People
King of Fans is recalling some 190,000 ceiling fans sold through Home Depot after the blades began detaching during operation.

Signia Active Hearing Aids Review: For People Who Love Earbuds
For many people, the idea of wearing hearing aids comes with a stigma, even if it would benefit them. So hearing aid companies have been working on new form factors to try and make that less of an issue. We review one of the latest, the earbud-shaped Active Pro model from Signia.

Newegg Forced People to Buy Gigabyte Power Supplies With Catastrophic Failure Rates
An investigation into Gigabyte power supplies has found that an unacceptable number of units suffer failures, many of them explosively. What makes all of this worse is that the same two model numbers known to be affected were part of Newegg's forced bundling program earlier this year.