07. I CLONED MY DOG, I CLONED MY DOG
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Cloning has long been a pillar of sci-fi tales. But now it's here, as is CRISPR technology - gene editing. What does this all look like exactly and how does it work? And more importantly, are we already eating clones at the dinner table?
Professor Rudolf Jaenisch is a Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Dorrit Moussaieff is an Israeli jewelry designer, editor, and businesswoman. She was the First Lady of Iceland from 2003 to 2016.
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[Phone ringing]
Receptionist: Hello this is…
John Holten: Hello. Uh, I think Dorrit’s expecting a call from me. My name’s John Holten.
Receptionist: She’s expecting a call from you? Okay, one second.
Dorrit Moussaieff: Hello?
JH: Hello.
DM: I’m yours.
JH: Great.
DM: I’m all yours. Now tell me, what is this for? Tell me what you want to know.
JH: Well I’d love to know, I mean if you’ve got like five minutes, ten minutes. I’d love to know about, well first off your dog Samur, your dog that passed away recently.
DM: My darling dog. Well sadly he’s no longer alive but hopefully he’ll will come back on heaven on earth. Which he has come back. He’s three days of age. And ViaGen has cloned him.
Eva Kelley: John …?
JH: Yes!
EK: Who is this on the phone?
JH: So that was me talking to Dorrit Moussaieff, the former first lady of Iceland. Dorrit is a jewelry designer. She’s also an editor, and a businesswoman. Originally she’s from Israel, but we have her on the show here because she’s cloned her dog Samur.
EK: Wow.
JH: Yeah, and since, you know, we always wanted to do an episode on cloning …
EK: Ah, you gave it away!
JH: I had this slightly frantic phone call with her. Because, you now, and this was three years ago! So it’s has been a long time in the works, this episode.
EK: Oh wow. Yeah let’s rewind that a bit and listen to the rest of that.
DM: Slightly a toxic lunch
JH: Okay, [laughs] that sounds good or maybe bad, I don’t know. Long did you have the dog? The first incarnation?
DM: For about twelve years.
JH: Okay. And you traveled together and lived together in Iceland? Or did he?
DM: Yes. He did not travel outside of Iceland because Iceland has quarantine laws.
JH: Oh really?
DM: But he traveled with me everywhere in Iceland and was the love of my life.
JH: And so you knew in advance that he was sick? Or was it a?
DM: No. The strange thing is that I did not know in advance. He didn’t show any signs of sickness at all. No, he was cloned long before he died. He was very fortunately cloned as soon as I found out that this was available to me.
JH: Would you consider that the same dog?
DM: No, no of course it’s two different dogs. They were going to be, one dog was twelve years old, the other dog woul dhave been a puppy. ViaGen did a great job. They picked up the cells in a frozen box. They went to America. And then we had two false starts but the third one succeeded brilliantly.
JH: Okay excellent. So then that came to term? You had a birth 3 days ago?
DM: Yes.
JH: Okay, excellent. And then what happens next?
DM: Well what happens next is obviously the baby has to be with his mother. And because he’s an only child, he needs to immediately be sociable and be with other puppies.
JH: And would the other dogs that he’s feeding with be cloned?
DM: Yes.
JH: Okay.
DM: Of course. They’re all being cloned. That’s what ViaGen does. They clone dogs.
JH: And so you don’t get to see him for some time?
DM: Well I can go and visit him. Not right now because they want him to be in as sterile environment as possible. But once he’s 8 weeks I will collect him or they will bring him to me depending on my choice.
JH: And then he’ll be just as strong and healthy as any other dog?
DM: Well we hope so. We hope so. I mean my next thing is, I’m actually going to have another one cloned but I’m going to try and attempt to get the cancerous gene out of him.
JH: Oh wow.
DM: And this will, of course, help humanity as a whole.
JH: Yeah.
DM: That’s why I find it so difficult to understand people who are criticizing it. It’s unethical? It’s probably one of the most ethical things they could be doing. Tell me, where are you based?
EK: Ok, so first of all, that was my favorite phone call ever. She seems amazing.
JH I’m not like the best of phone calls and it was a bit intimidating. And yeah, it is. It’s pretty wild, you know, cloning your dog.
EK: Yeah, definitely. Um in this episode, we want to find out more about cloning, the actual process, the future of cloning, but also, where we’re at in the present moment when it comes to cloning and gene editing technology.
JH: Yes, the CRISPR technology.
EK: It always makes me hungry when I hear CRISPR.
JH: That’s because you’ve spent too long in the UK now, and you’re into crisps! Not chips.
EK: No, French fries! So true!
JH: Chips or french fries?
EK: I say french fries but I do say crisps, which is shameful. But I’ve just noticed that if I say chips in the UK what I get is french fries, so you kind of like have to say crisps.
JH: Right. Yes, of course you do.
EK: But I have actually started saying trousers.
JH: [laughs] Anyway now I’m hungry because of all of this crips talk. This is Episode 5. I cloned my dog. I cloned my dog.
EK: See what we did there?
[Intro: The Life Cycle, a podcast about the future of humanity]
EK: So, John, tell me more about Dorrit Moussaiieff, and how she became a cloned dog owner.
JH: Right, so Dorrit decided to clone her dog Samur back in 2019 after he died sadly of cancer. And as you heard her say, he was the big love of her life, and it makes sense I guess if you lose a pet, or anybody, who was the big love of your life, you’d want to be able to bring them back. This is a kind of age old human instinct. Or it’s a dream at least, of humanity.
EK: Yeah, I guess that does make sense, even though I would say the method is unconventional. She mentioned ViaGen cloned him. What’s ViaGen?
JH: Yeah, it’s, quite literally, a company that clones pet animals. It’s a service that, you know?
EK: They provide.
JH: They provide.
EK: But what kind of animals do they clone?
JH: Well, the last time I checked, they offer dog and cat cloning services. And a dog costs 50 thousand dollars and a cat, is a bit less, at 35 thousand dollars.
EK: Wow. I wonder what a goldfish would cost.
JH: [laughs] Yeah, that might be a bit more affordable, who knows. It seems like they’re judging on the size there. Cat owners will be like ‘wait a minute, my cat is smarter than most peoples dogs’. But you can pay in two installments, so that’s good news.
EK: Okay … I just have so many questions. There’s just something about cloning that’s kind of creepy. But I think that’s also because, honestly, the process, to me at least, has always been mysterious. I think most of us remember Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal ever, cloned in 1996 in Scotland. But like, how exactly do you clone a sheep, or a dog?
JH: ViaGen, conveniently enough, have a video that explains what they do. So let’s maybe have a listen to that.
[ViaGen video plays]
EK: It all sounds really positive and so … happy? Like, why wouldn’t you clone your dog if you had 50 grand to spare? It’s so easy! I just don’t really buy into it though. Like, I can’t help but feel like there is a more sinister side to this.
JH: I don’t know, maybe you feel that way because, depictions of cloning in science fiction. And it does feel like that’s what we’re talking about, like it’s science fiction even though this episode shoes that it’s not, that it’s here. But it’s always been represented as something sinister that goes really wrong. Think of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, or even Jurassic Park, that’s a kind of cloning scenario. Blade Runner, I guess that’s also a whole cloning thing. And anyway, there’s lots of depictions of cloning going on.
EK: That’s true, you might be right. Ok, so let’s really dig into the process. In that ViaGen video, what I get from that is, basically, you do a tissue biopsy and you use that tissue sample to culture new cells of the same being, in this case, a dog. Then you take a cell from a female dog, and replace the nucleus. And the nucleus is the part of a cell, it’s the bit in the middle, that contains all the DNA and the genetic information, so it’s like the control room of a cell. And so, you strip the female dog’s cell of its nucleus, so that means, it’s now a cell without any genetic information in it. And then the original dog’s cell is inserted into that egg cell, which was stripped, which is empty, and through a secretive patented process as they call it in the video (which most likely is an electric pulse) they fuse the two and an embryo starts growing.
JH: Yeah, it’s pretty incredible. And this is all happening in a laboratory.
EK: Yeah.
JH: And then from there, the rest of the process is probably, I guess, a bit more familiar to most people. The embryo is transferred to the womb of a surrogate dog mother and pregnancy and birth occur there after.
EK: I thought of one thing that makes cloning less creepy.
JH: Okay?
EK: Yeah, so twins are technically clones. Identical twins, of course. They come from the same cell, the exact same DNA. In fact, you could even argue that identical twins are more identical to each other than clones are to their DNA donors because twins usually share the same environment growing up, which clones do not. And twins aren’t creepy, right?
JH: No, not at all, my nieces are identical twins! And I love them very much.
EK: They’re not creepy?
JH: [laughs] No.
EK: So, to find out more about the scientific aspect of cloning, I went to Boston to speak to Professor Rudolf Jaenisch, who is a professor of Biology at MIT and he went on to explain this process of removing the nucleus in more detail.
Professor Rudolf Jaenisch: Development occurs by it comes from the egg obviously, from the fertilized egg and during development certain genes are activated in a given tissue. Let’s say in the liver, but they are not active in the brain. In the brain, there are brain genes active but not in the liver. So this is called differential gene expression in tissues. On cloning: initially, that is quite a while ago, one thought that differentiation is a one-way road. You go from the totipotent to a pluripotent to embryonic cells to differentiated cells – one way. Now, cloning really proved this to be false. Because in cloning, you take a nucleus from a differentiated cell. For example from the mammary gland in the case of Dolly.
PRJ: Dolly was the first cloned animal. You take the nucleus, which is of course only is there to express the mammary-specific genes, for example milk production, whatever. You put this in an egg whose own nucleus was removed. Now the amazing thing happens: that the egg can what we call reprogram this differentiated nucleus (a nucleus coming from a differentiated cell which only makes milk genes) to something which is embryonic. So it turns off those genes, and turns on the embryonic genes. And when you know that this fertilized egg (or this egg we removed its own nucleus from) off the transfer, when you let it develop and put it into a foster mother, you get an animal – like Dolly. So this is a pretty amazing result.
EK: So, that’s so amazing right? Jaenisch goes back to Dolly the sheep, and with Dolly, they used a cell from the mammary gland. So this cell’s purpose was to express something specific, milk production. And when that cell was inserted into the stripped egg, the nucleus reprogrammed into turning on its embryonic genes and turning off its milk producing genes. And basically, recreated itself.
PRJ: It argues that the egg is able to reprogram, to reset the genome to an embryonic state. So differentiation is not irreversible. It is reversible. It is called epigenetic regulation. So that really was the key thing. So you can, in principle, therefore generate identical copies of anyone by nuclear cloning. Because if you take the nucleus from a skin cell of anyone and put the nucleus into the egg, the individual you get out of this has exactly the same genetic composition as the donor. It is an identical copy. Except that it is maybe thirty years younger.
PRJ: However old the doner was. So this is cloning in which you can then make identical copies of any sort. So that is the key. In agriculture, this is used. For example to make prized bulls – to make the identical. In normal reproduction, you go to meiosis for everything. It gets remixed. In cloning, you short-cut meiosis, which is the recombination that occurs before fertilization, you shortcut that and you get identical individuals. So that is the key of cloning.
EK: And then we started talking about CRISPR-Cas9, which is a gene-editing technology and I guess you could say it falls under the same umbrella of topics as cloning does.
PRJ: So the CRISPR was like molecular scissors. So the CRISPR system came from bacteria, from an immune system of bacteria which they use as defense against viruses. It is a very ingenious system. So it’s a molecular scissors where you can cut the DNA at a predetermined position. So you can pre-determine, I want to cut this particular gene, so you do the CRISPR procedure, and you cut it. The point is that it is extremely efficient. It is so efficient – we did the first experiments in mice – you can do it directly in the fertilized egg. So in eggs, you cannot select eggs, but it’s maybe with an efficiency of eighty percent you get the mutants. It was mind-boggling.
EK: Jaenisch told me that what they used to do in the 80s was something called homologous recombination. You would go inside the genetic material and mutate a gene to create a certain disease for example, and then you could study that disease more closely. They used this technique on mice. And they referred to them as mutant mice.
PRJ: If you do the mutations via embryonic stem cells, it takes you one to two years because of all the manipulations involved. With CRISPR, it is three weeks. Just the gestation of the mouse. Three weeks. It was so efficient that people are now using that routinely to do anything. And that sparked then the idea of well should we use it in humans? That becomes a whole debate – should one do this with humans? Why or why not?
EK: So CRISPR isn’t just called CRISPR because it sounds so nice and crunchy, it actually stands for: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
JH: [laughs] Okay. That’s a mouthful: of crunchy crisps. What’s your favorite bag of crisps?
EK: No I’m not that British yet.
JH: No?
EK: No, I’m not like a big crisp-eater. They have something called shrimp cocktail which I see around a lot. Like on the bus, like school kids.
JH: As a flavor?
EK: Yeah. It’s okay.
JH: [laughs] They’ve definitely cloned that flavor combo.
EK: [laughs] Yeah. Okay, yeah, so that is, wait I’ve lost it here. Obviously in science, everything builds on something that came before it, so there are a lot of people that can be credited with some kind of involvement in it, but the main names in the game today are Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, George Church, and Feng Zhang, who collectively discovered in 2012 that the CRISPR system could be used as a cut-and-paste-tool to modify genomes. Doudna and Charpentier received the Nobel Prize in 2020 for the development of a method for genome editing.
JH: And so Eva, do you remember that CRISPR scandal from a few years ago?
EK: Yesah! You mean with the Chinese twins?
JH: Yes! A Chinese scientist called He Jiankui, told the Associated Press in 2018 that he had altered the genomes of twin baby girls, Lulu and Nana. And his intention was to make their cells resistant to infection by HIV, when they would grow up in the future. So he told the AP that he altered embryos of seven couples during their fertility treatment, and that in each case the father was HIV positive and the mother was negative. And what he did was, he deleted a region of a receptor called CCR5 on the surface of the white blood cells, which sometimes occurs naturally as a rare natural genetic variatio. And this would make it more difficult for HIV to infect those white blood cells. Now it should be stated that none of the embryos were infected with HIV in this process. But he claimed that what he wanted to do was to protect the babies from possible infection later on at some point in their lives.
EK: And there was a big outrage about this, especially from within the scientific community it seemed.
JH: There was, because, for one He altered the genome in early stage embryos, and that change would affect the sperm and eggs of the embryos and make it hereditary thereafter, if they had children themselves. And that is barred in most of the world. And there are other studies that have used CRISPR on CCR5, that’s the genetic spot that cripples HIV infection like I just said earlier, but they are used on patients that already have HIV and they gene-edit so-called somatic cells, so the change would not be passed on to the patient’s offspring.
EK: Somatic cells are non-reproductive cells.
JH: Yes, but mainly, scientists generally responded to the experiment by saying it was premature. Anthony Fauci, who at that time, nobody really knew who he was. As we’ve all gotten to know Fauci because of the 2020 pandemic he became a household name. Well back just before then in 2019, he responded to He’s experiment as follows: and I quote “The underlying purpose of doing the experiment was obviously to show that they could do gene editing on an embryo, but the purpose for the party involved does not make any sense. There are so many ways to adequately, efficiently, and definitively protect yourself against HIV. The thought of editing the genes of an embryo to get to an effect that you could easily do in so many other ways is unethical.”
EK: Right, because the twins weren’t necessarily ever going to contract HIV.
JH: Yes. And lastly, because gene-editing is still so experimental, off-target mutations can easily occur. And potentially, the gene edit could cause health problems later in life for these embryos. For example, the CCR5 gene isn’t solely a receptor for HIV. It also has other functions, some of which we might not even know what the would be. But what we do know that it plays a part in memory and there is research being done on CCR5’s links to Alzheimer’s for example. It should be said also that He’s experiment still remains very mysterious to this day because he hasn’t published any transparent of definitive scientific data about the whole affair. In the end, He was fined a hefty sum and sentenced to three years in jail.
EK: So this is obviously a huge ethical issue also, which we haven't really talked about yet. Are we allowed to optimize our genes? Sure, it seems great if you can save someone from developing a terrible disease and if you can ease suffering, but my next thought is: This technology will likely be accessed the most by the rich or the privileged, at first at least. What would that lead to? What would the average wealthy person use CRISPR for?
JH: Yeah, well I guess they would probably use it to eliminate things like cancer genes, or any other diseases, hereditary diseases that they know they might have.
EK: At some point, I mean, I’m just spitballing here, you might be able to alter the gene responsible for aging? Or somehow access the fountain of youth essentially.
JH: Yeah. It always does end up there, doesn’t it. Immortality.
EK: Yeah, maybe that’s just my mind though. No but seriously, one thing I’ve noticed from speaking with scientists is that, in general, they genuinely want to make the world a better place. Like, they want to help people, cure people, somehow make life better for people. Whereas, what ends up happening, is that people who are driven by profit then seem to chime in and commercialize said innovation. I’m not saying that scientists aren’t driven by money, you know I’m generalizing, but that’s just where things always seem to take a wrong turn.
JH: Yeah, I mean we’ve seen this before. It’s always that science needs to ‘pay for itself’ and so therefore make money, not just be a source of good.
EK: Maybe we should save that for a special episode.
JH: Yes. We can have a deep dive into, what, yeah. Yes we should have a special episode. But tell me, what did Jaenisch think of the Chinese CRISPR twins?
EK: Yeah, I asked him that!
PRJ: To my opinion, there is no real application in humans. I can go through the arguments. People think they could eliminate bad diseased genes, such as Huntington’s, which is a dominant disease and a terrible disease. You just correct the gene. There are various reasons why I think that does not make sense. One is, first of all you can make pre-implantation diagnosis. You can take a biopsy of an embryo before you implant the embryo and figure out whether fifty percent of the embryos are normal. And you don’t implant embryos which have the mutation. Very straight forward. It works.
PRJ: So you do not need correction. So there are many other ways, there are many also scientific issues of why this is problematic. So, we do not necessarily need that. You can ask the question, should you do it for eliminating a gene? For example, what was done in China, the HIV receptor. So first of all, this experiment was totally unacceptable. But there is no good rationale for that. And the reasons are the following: scientifically, this receptor, when you delete it, makes you most susceptible to other diseases. These children, if it worked, are at risk for getting other viral infections, much more serious ones, or even getting multiple sclerosis with a higher incidence.
PRJ: All the data is there. So this receptor has other functions except transporting HIV. Then, if you make a human who is resistant to a disease, you could call this an enhancement. It is not a treatment. There is no medical need. Enhancement. You can ask the question, is this the right thing to do? But more importantly, you do not need it in embryos, you can do it somatically. AIDS patients take the bone marrow out, inactivate the receptor, put the bone marrow cells back, and they are resistant to HIV. They are cured. So you do not need that.
EK: But are they then also then more susceptible to?
PRJ: No, it is only bone marrow.
EK: Okay.
PRJ: And then, of course, first of all the patient can give their consent, and you can then react yourself. These viruses likely infect other cells. I do not know exactly. There might or may not be receptors. But that is not having AIDS, I think that’s. These babies, they may never get infected with AIDS. So I think it is an outrageous experiment to my opinion. It will have major repercussions for the field. Particularly, because you can do it somatically, treat these diseases, there is no need for doing this in embryos. It is not clear exactly how this experiment was done. Implant these embryos without really analyzing it before, is unacceptable. But anyway, that is of concern. And you can make enhancement. You can ask the question: can you make human beings who are taller or more intelligent
EK: Designer babies.
PRJ: Designer babies; and intelligence or something is so complex – no way. It is just beyond what we can do. Taller, you could, but do you want that? That is not a scientific issue, it is an ethical issue. So do we want that or do we not want that?
EK: And you would say you do not want that?
PRJ: No, I would certainly have quite a lot of reservations.
EK: Yeah.
PRJ: You can just read Huxley’s Brave New World and you see exactly what he envisioned a hundred years ago. That indeed you could imagine doing. With animals, they can do this. So, for example, a very useful application would be to change mosquitos in a way that they become resistant to malaria. Then, these strains would take over and sort of compete well with the other wild mosquitos. So you do not kill them but you make them so they do not propagate the malaria anymore. That is useful.
PRJ: You could argue, and probably for this type of application maybe not, in agriculture, in biomedical research – which we are doing, we can make mutants of anything, we can make mutants now in monkeys, before you could not do that. It is rather efficient because it’s so efficient, this whole thing. Mice, we make these mutations in mice daily. It is a very useful exciting technology. I would always think you cannot prevent people from doing experiments to get new knowledge. You can’t, It does not make sense.
PRJ: But if it is application, by application I mean application to humans, that needs to be discussed and regulated. Society should say we want this or we don’t want this. So this becomes not a scientific issue anymore. This experiment now raises exactly that question: where are we? Do we want that or do we not want this? Some societies might say, sure, let’s do it, and others may say no, we don’t want that. That is really up to public discussion.
EK: So he’s basically saying, it’s up to science to innovate, and develop new technologies and research. And then, it’s up to the public to decide what to do with it.
JH: Yeah and I think like right now, in the general public’s mind, CRISPR is much more palatable than full on cloning a human.
EK: Yeah, it does seem less far-fetched, but I wonder if that is because we’re just not far enough into the future of it yet. In thirty years, cloning might seem about as crazy as CRISPR does to us now. I asked Jaenisch how he imagined that future.
EK: And so, with cloning humans, what kind of future do you imagine for that?
PRJ: None.
EK: None?
PRJ: So the reason is scientific for that because most clones are not normal. It’s called epigenetic abnormality, we have looked at this very carefully. So most clones, I think I would argue all clones are not normal. But some are less abnormal than others. And the less abnormal ones survive, but they might have some problems, right, it’s not totally established.
PRJ: There is really no good application for cloning humans. That’s just for science fiction. For animal agriculture, yes, people do this and people think that’s a good thing and that’s going on and I have no problem with this, to keep the same gene combination in an animal that is useful. People use it for cloning their Struppi, their little dog. There are companies doing this. (laughs).
EK: I’m jumping in here to clarify that last sentence in case you couldn’t hear properly. Jaenisch says: “People use it for cloning their dog, Struppi.” Struppi is sort of the go-to generic dog name in Germany, like Buddy might be in English.
JH: Oh, good, because I thought that Struppi might be some kind of new mutant animal.
EK: No, no it’s just like any old dog. Oh, and, Jaenisch is German. Ok, back to the interview.
EK: What has been successfully cloned so far? Which animals have been cloned?
PRJ: Well Dolly was a sheep, and then probably fifteen different species. We have worked a lot with mice, rats, cows, goats, cats, dogs, even monkeys. So, it really works. It is not efficient. It is very inefficient, so only a few percent succeed.
EK: And what happens to the unsuccessful ones, do they die?
PRJ: They die at various stages of development or right after birth. So they have defects. So the clones, in general, have epigenetic defects. Not everything is correctly reset. They have certain, you see them, in general much bigger, it’s called large offspring syndrome, so you see.
EK: Oh, they are bigger?
PRJ: They are bigger yeah.
EK: In size?
PRJ: Because of edema and whatever. So they are just not normal. So we know what kind of genes are affected. So only a few are normal enough to make it to adulthood.
EK: Okay, and do you ever have to terminate the life a clone?
PRJ: Yes, Dolly had to be killed, because she was too sick at six years of age. Many mice just die a week after birth or so, clones. Some survive.
EK: So, ok. The life of clones is pretty bleak. Dolly suffered health issues. She developed arthritis quite early and was eventually euthanized at age 6 due to an incurable lung tumor. Incredibly, the Roslin Institute, the place that cloned Dolly, states on their website that they don’t clone animals any longer due to the low success rate of cloning. They go on to state that Dolly was the only animal born from 277 cloned embryos.
JH: Wow yeah, that’s a lot. It’s funny, you know, Viagen somehow forgot to mention all of this in their promotion video.
EK: Wait, in Dorrit Moussaiieff’s call with you, remember when she said:
DM: And then we had two false starts.
JH: Mmm, yeah exactly I guess that’s what that’s referring to.
EK: So hold on, I feel like I’m only now really starting to see the brutal side of this. So, fine you use the nuclear transfer, the cloned embryo is growing. But then, the surrogate mother, I assume has to go through hormone therapy to prepare herself to accept the embryo, which we all know is a potentially harrowing process, then she has a high chance of miscarrying, but let’s say the pregnancy carries on, she still has to go through pregnancy itself, has to give birth. I mean, that’s, I’m sorry, but that’s torture. Like, imagine a forced pregnancy. And yes, of course, the cynic in me immediately thinks of Roe v Wade being overturned, but this isnt about abortion rights. This is deliberately implanting an animal with an embryo and forcing them to go through a pregnancy. And, I know we’re talking about animals and not humans, but like, that’s insane.
JH: Yeah and also, what struck me listening back to your conversation with Jaenisch was when he mentioned that cloning is used in agriculture all the time. And it made me ask, what is he referring to exactly?
EK: Right? I don’t think … I mean, I at least was not aware of this.
JH: Eva are we like eating clones?
EK: Oh my gosh. This makes me realize actually cloning doesn’t have much to do with humans, yet at least, this is really an animal rights issue.
[ominous music plays]
JH: Dun dun dun. Um yes. Should we?
EK: Like a cliffhanger sound?
JH: Yeah let’s just stop it there. We’re eating clones, attack of the clones!
EK: We’ll continue this in our next episode, part 2 of the Cloning Saga, titled “I cloned my cow. I cloned my cow.” See what we did there?
EK: Thanks for listening, and thanks to our guests Dorrit Moussaieff and Professor Rudolf Jaenisch.
JH: This episode was written and produced by Eva Kelley with additional writing by myself John Holten.
EK: Sound editing and design by David Magnusson.
JH: Mundi Vondi is our executive producer and he’s also created the artwork for this episode, in collaboration with Midjourney.
EK: Additional research, script supervision, fact-checking by Savita Joshi.
JH: Follow us on social media. We’re on Instagram and on Twitter. Subscribe to the podcast if you don’t already do so.
EK: And please reach out, if you’d like. We’d love to hear from you.