Jon: Welcome to Episode 148 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I’m your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: How are you doing, Jon?

Jon: I’m doing good. Today we’re going to chat a little bit about the cutting edge of genomic science, specifically about what can be seen in a very controversial way we’re going to discuss cloning, and in this case the cloning of animals to save species that may go extinct.

Dirk: That's a pretty specific topic there, Jon.

Jon: Yeah. Or rather that's the topic that's engendering this larger conversation about genomics, cloning, and extinction. The news story that generated that topic for us was a lab in Seoul, Korea led by a controversial scientist plans to move from cloning pets, so you might have a beloved pet who you want to continue to accompany you and be with you and your family, they can clone those now, and they’re going to move from cloning pets to cloning animals that are on the verge of extinction.

Dirk: Let's start with cloning pets, what do you think of that?

Jon: Well, first when I was reading the news story, because I’m not immediately aware of all the advances in cloning, I was kind of shocked that you could actually do that. The technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and you extract the nucleus of a skin cell from the animal that you want to clone and you put it into an egg where the nucleus is removed. That's kind of freaky. I don't know what you read as a teenager but I read a lot of Stephen King which might say a lot about me, but regardless I read a lot of Stephen King and he has this novel called “Pet Cemetery” and it's all about this spooky burial ground where people take their beloved pets and they go and they bury them and then a couple of days later, pop, they come out and these cats and dogs show up.

They’re not right, they’re freaky resurrected pets. Then so mayhem ensues, and that's “Pet Cemetery”.

Dirk: Hey ho, let's go.

Jon: There are movies, at least one movie about that. What we have here, I mean I hate to say it but it's kind of similar, you’re taking the skin cell from your pet that you love so much and you’re creating more or less the pet again. They have some photos on the New Scientist site of some of these pets, and the reporter’s comment on it was it was a little freaky because some of these cloned pets had the same mannerisms. They have a couple of cloned dogs there and they have very similar mannerisms which they’re both sort of doing at roughly the same time which kind of freaked the reporter out. All that is to say that is technology, number one, that I didn’t know really existed beyond sort of the stage of if you remember Dolly the sheep that got cloned maybe it was like a decade ago now.

Dirk: More than that, yeah.

Jon: Yeah. From what I understood Dolly was not a healthy kind of sheep because the DNA was at a stage where it had degraded a certain amount and so was not behaving like the DNA would for a young sheep. They had a young sheep with old DNA, that didn’t sound to me to be a good fit and these clones had all sorts of problems. I’m not familiar with what the scenario is now and whether they’ve figured out some of those problems going forward, but wow, to have these pets, I mean that's sort of a desire that people have is, boy, I wish I could continue onward, I wish life, that things weren’t mortal. It's like this weird unveiling of a kind of immortality.

I do wonder if there’s degraded DNA in these cloned pets, but I think you can take from my long diatribe that I’m a little disturbed by it and maybe I’m just not sophisticated enough to understand what the implications are, but I’m a little unnerved by it all. Your turn.

Dirk: Yeah, I mean back in the old country they call it simulacrum. I mean look, Jon, I’m not really unnerved by it, I’m more curious about it,