Would you pay $50,000 to clone your pet? As Tom Brady duplicates his old family dog, scientists reveal why cloned animals are NOT identical to the original pet
NFL superstar Tom Brady has revealed the strange reason that his new dog looks so similar to his previous pooch.
The seven-time Super Bowl winner says the uncanny likeness is because his puppy, Junie, is a clone of his pit bull-mix, Lua, who passed away two years earlier.
Lua was cloned by the biotech firm Colossal Bioscience, which is most famous for its attempts to 'de-extinct' the woolly mammoth.
However, experts say cloning your family pet might not be worth the eye-watering $50,000 (£38,340) price tag.
Brady claimed that the company 'gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog'.
But in reality, scientists say that a cloned animal will not be identical to the original.
Just like identical twins can have different appearances and personalities, environmental factors mean there's no guarantee that a dog and its clone will even look the same.
More worryingly, experts say that these cloned dogs will be more susceptible to disease and have a shortened lifespan.
Tom Brady has revealed that his new dog Junie (left) is a clone of his old pet Lua (right), who passed away two years ago
Brady says that his dog was cloned using technology from a company called Viagen, which is now owned by Colossal.
Biogen is famous for having cloned a number of celebrity pets, including dogs belonging to Paris Hilton and Barbra Streisand.
Brady, who is an investor in Colossal, said in a statement that he was 'excited how Colossal and Viagen's tech together can help both families losing their beloved pets while helping to save endangered species.'
He added: 'I love my animals. They mean the world to me and my family.
'A few years ago, I worked with Colossal and leveraged their non-invasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family's elderly dog before she passed.'
Viagen's pet cloning works by taking a DNA sample from the 'template' pet and transferring that genetic code into a new animal.
Pet owners provide a sample of tissue, from which DNA is extracted, cultured, multiplied, and cryogenically stored in liquid nitrogen.
When the owners are ready for their new pet, the DNA is taken and inserted into an egg cell that has had its nucleus, the part of the cell where genetic information is stored, removed.
Brady had his dog cloned by Colossal Biosciences, the company behind attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth. The cloning process works by taking DNA from the 'template' pet and inserting it into a donor egg cell
Experts say that, while the new dog might have the same genes as Lua (pictured), she will not be completely identical
If successful, the egg will be reprogrammed and begin to divide into an embryo that is inserted into a surrogate mother, who carries it to term.
The result is an animal that contains every single gene that is present in the original animal, compared to about 50 per cent, which is normally inherited from parents.
Viagen's website claims that this process will 'help you continue life's journey with the companion who changed everything.'
However, this hides an extremely important detail.
Professor David Coltman, Chair of the Department of Biology at Western University, told Daily Mail: 'A cloned pet will be genetically identical to its template, but that doesn't mean it will be the same in its appearance or behaviour.'
This is because an animal's traits are not 100 per cent determined by the genes it is born with.
In reality, many traits are determined by what scientists call 'epigenetic factors', which are essentially on and off switches for genes in the genetic code.
Environmental factors, stress, diet, and even some social conditions can activate these switches and turn some genes on or off.
Just like twins, such as Cole and Dylan Sprouse (left to right), do not look or act exactly the same way. Two pets with the same genetic code will grow up to be different due to environmental factors
Some of these switches are even tripped while an animal is in the womb or passed down to children and grandchildren after being activated by something in the environment.
This is why twins who are born with the exact same genes don't always look and act the same as one another.
And the exact same thing is true of genetically identical cloned animals.
'It will experience a different environment and will be affected by whatever other biological impacts the cloning process has on its development,' says Professor Coltman.
That means Brady should have no reason to expect his cloned pet to look or act much like the original dog.
However, besides this disappointing fact, cloning pets comes with a bigger set of problems.
The first animal to be cloned was Dolly the sheep in 1996, which died after just six and a half years due to a lung infection and cancer.
Although the lifespan of clones has improved, studies have repeatedly shown that these animals are more at risk of disease.
A more worrying factor is that, just like the first cloned animal Dolly the sheep (pictured), cloned pets are more prone to disease and are likely to have a shorter lifespan
Professor Coltman says: 'I think it is inevitable that a clone will be more susceptible to disease or a shortened lifespan, and I think we have seen that in the past, even though the technology has come a long way since Dolly.'
Likewise, research has shown that the cloning process has a high failure rate, with many clones not born fit and healthy.
One 2018 study estimated that the average success rate was just 20 per cent across the pet cloning industry.
Penny Hawkins, Head of the RSPCA's Animals in Science Department, told Daily Mail: 'There are also serious ethical and welfare concerns around cloning technology, potentially requiring procedures that cause pain and distress, with high failure and mortality rates; and animals frequently suffer physical ailments such as tumours, pneumonia and abnormal growth patterns.'
On social media, fans' reactions to Tom Brady's decision to clone his pet have been extremely critical.
'As much as I wish I could've cloned all my pets, I'm telling you right now Tom this is weird get out of this investment and get in on a pet adoption center,' wrote one commenter on X.
While another fan joked: 'Bro got a Super Bowl ring and a Jurassic Park starter kit'
Even long-time fan Dave Portnoy, Barstool Sports's, said: 'I'm a dog guy and a Brady guy. This is weird as f***.'
HOW WAS DOLLY THE SHEEP CREATED?
Dolly was the only surviving lamb from 277 cloning attempts and was created from a mammary cell taken from a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep.
She was created in 1996 at a laboratory in Edinburgh using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
The pioneering technique involved transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into an unfertilised egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed.
Dolly the sheep made history 20 years ago after being cloned at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Pictured is Dolly in 2002
An electric shock stimulated the hybrid cell to begin dividing and generate an embryo, which was then implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother.
Dolly was the first successfully produced clone from a cell taken from an adult mammal.
Dolly's creation showed that genes in the nucleus of a mature cell are still able to revert back to an embryonic totipotent state - meaning the cell can divide to produce all of the difference cells in an animal.
