Barbra Streisand‬, ‪Dog‬, ‪Cloning‬‬ Feb 28, 2018 - Now

Barbra Streisand‬, ‪Dog‬, ‪Cloning‬‬ Feb 28, 2018 - Now

Barbra Streisand reveals she cloned her dog twice 

Barbra Streisand has revealed she successfully made two clones of her pet dog after it died last year.The singer and actor told the Hollywood trade publication Variety that cells were taken from the mouth and stomach of her 14-year-old Coton de Tulear dog, Samantha.

They have different personalities,” Streisand said of the puppies, called Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet. “I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness.”

 

Her two pups Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett (who appear periodically on her Instagram) are clones of her Coton du Tulear Samantha, who passed away in May of 2017. Streisand has a third Coton du Tulear named Miss Fanny, who is a distant cousin of Samantha.

"I'm waiting for them [the clones] to get older to see if they have Samantha's brown eyes and seriousness," she said. She added that Miss Lavender and Miss Violet have their own personalities.

It's unclear where she might have had the two dogs created, and her representative didn't respond to a request for comment. Streisand also owns a third Coton Du Tulear, a cousin of Samantha named Miss Fanny.The cloning of animals is now a regular practice both for animal owners and scientists.

In the interview, Streisand said when the cloned dogs arrived, she dressed them in red and lavender to tell them apart, which is how they got their names.While waiting for their arrival, Streisand said she became smitten with another dog, which was a distant relation of Samantha.

The Coton de Tulear dog was called Funny Girl, but Streisand adopted her and gave her the name Miss Fanny, which is how Fanny Brice’s dresser refers to Streisand’s character in the 1968 musical that launched her acting career.

Streisand followed Funny Girl, for which she won an Oscar, with Hello Dolly!, but said she never liked the film.“I thought I was totally miscast. I tried to get out of it,” she told Variety. “I think it’s so silly. It’s so old-time musical.”

As for scientists, in Brazil there's a project to clone those animals that are especially endangered. Scientists in Russia are even exploring whether extinct animals such as the mammoth can be brought back to life by cloning.

The process of cloning involves taking a body cell from an animal and then inserting into an egg cell that's had its nucleus of DNA removed. Sometimes this involves needles and, in another method, electric current to bring the cells together. 

At first, the embryo is kept in a test-tube. Some time later, it's inserted into the womb of a female animal. The guinea pig -- as it were -- for this process was Dolly the sheep 22 years ago.

I'm of two minds about this. Part of me wants to let sleeping dogs lie and dead ones to join them. I also understand the emotions involved in wanting to have memories in the corner of your mind all the time, having them reside in your frontal lobes and even your living room might be a little much for some.

Sometimes, you just have to let go.

The history of cloning animals

The news of Streisand’s cloned dog comes more than two decades after the infamous cloning of Dolly the sheep in Scotland in 1996.

After Dolly, it took nearly a decade to successfully clone a dog. The first cloned dog, Snuppy, an Afghan hound, was born in 2005 in South Korea at Seoul National University.

In 2016, the first dog cloned on American soil was born — a Jack Russell Terrier named Nubia, who was cloned by the Texas-based company ViaGen. The company has since cloned “over a hundred” dogs and cats, according to a January 2018 story by The Daily Beast. ViaGen, which started cloning livestock, is reportedly the only U.S. company performing pet cloning.

How much cloning a dog costs

NPR reported that Sooam Biotech Research Foundation was charging around $100,000 to clone a person’s dog in 2015.

ViaGen has slashed that price in half; they charge $50,000 to clone a dog and $25,000 to clone a cat. 

The company also offers genetic preservation for $1,600, which involves a veterinarian performing a biopsy on the pet to remove tissue, which ViaGen then saves, storing the pet’s genetic information. With genetic preservation, owners can elect whether to clone their pets at a later date.

How cloning works

The harvesting of cells from a dog can be done when the animal is still alive or after it has died, so long as the cells are collected within a certain amount of time — fewer than five days, according to a video from Tech Insider.

To collect from a live dog, a veterinarian performs skin punch biopsy on a pet’s abdomen, and then sends the genetic material to the lab performing the cloning. Scientists then remove the nucleus from eggs harvested from donor pets (oocyctes), and insert a skin cell from the dog to be cloned. The embryo is then given an electric shock to start the embryo’s dividing process.

Next, the modified embryos are implanted via an invasive surgery into surrogate dogs. If all goes to plan, a genetic twin of the pet dog is born.

Though, while the genes may be identical, there may be slight variations, Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, tells The Daily Beast. The animal will not have the same personality as the original pet.

Cloning’s ethical issues

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Woestendiek wrote a book Dog, Inc. about dog cloning. In an interview with Scientific American, he discussed the ethical issues with dog cloning.

“One is the sort of philosophical question of whether we really need new ways to make dogs when so many are already being put down in shelters,” says Woestendiek, also noting that he witnessed surplus cloned dogs in cages in South Korea.

There are also concerns about the amount of dogs it needed to produce just one clone, says Woestendiek. In addition to the original dog, cloners need to harvest egg cells around a dozen dogs in heat. And then they need surrogate mother dogs to carry the puppies to birth. “That’s a whole lot of surgeries, on a whole lot of dogs,” Woestendiek says.