Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.11.2018, Page 4

Jurassic Bark: For-
mer First Lady Wants
To Clone Her Dog
To clone or not to clone?
Words: Andie Fontaine Photos: Wikipedia
Dorrit Moussaieff, former
First Lady of Iceland, has
announced her intent to clone her
dog Sámur, RÚV reports. While
this would normally pass off as a
personal decision by a pet owner,
the fact that her husband, former
President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson,
chose to share this decision with
listeners of the radio programme
Morgunkaffið on Rás 2, opened the
subject to public discussion about
what cloning means and who it is
for.
Ólafur told listeners that Sámur
is now eleven years old, and being
in these advanced years, Dorrit
decided to send a DNA sample to a
company in Texas in order to clone
him. Kári Stefánsson, the CEO of
genetics company deCODE, clari-
fied for RÚV what is entailed in the
cloning process.
More like twins
than exact copies
Kári explained that cloning the dog
is not really the same as making an
exact copy of the dog they know and
love. Rather, the clone of Sámur will
be more like if the original had been
a monozygotic twin. It is therefore
unlikely the Clone Sámur will have
the exact same personality as Origi-
nal Sámur.
Icelanders across social media have
responded to the news with a acom-
bination of humour and confusion,
Vísir reports.
Poshies only
Jokes aside, there are a number of
ethical questions raised by cloning
one’s pet. It is clear, for example,
that this service is undoubtedly
one reserved for the upper class.
Viagen Pets, the company which
will clone Sámur, charges $50,000
(plus sales tax) for the service.
As the Smithsonian pointed
out last March, “the cloning
process still requires numerous
dogs to produce a single clone.
Consider: Many cloned pregnan-
cies don’t take hold in the uterus
or die shortly after birth,” meaning
many dogs will be produced and
then ultimately put down in order
to produce a viable clone.
Alexandra Horowitz, head of
Columbia University’s Canine
Cognition Lab, added that many
people who clone their pets do not
really understand what it is that
they are getting, saying: “There
might be some breed tendencies,
and there certainly are tenden-
cies that a genome will avail that
makes a cloned dog maybe likelier
than some other non-genetically
similar dog to do a kind of thing.
But everything that matters to us
about the personality of a dog is
not in those genes. Everything is
in the interaction of that genome
with the environment, starting
from the time they’re in utero—
just as with humans.”
4The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 20— 2018First
Former First Lady of Iceland Dorrit Moussaieff
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