I Considered Cloning Myself -- But I'm Having Second Thoughts

The first thing to say is that $100,000 is a lot of money. Especially for a dog. OK, two dogs – clones of Laura Jacques and Richard Remde’s late but much-loved boxer Dylan.

In their grief, Laura and Richard have turned to a controversial clinic in South Korea to create two clones from Dylan, using DNA taken 12 days after he died. Doggone – but only for the moment.

Initial reactions to the Guardian story have been largely negative. What a waste of money. What about the health risks to the cloned animals? Will other grief-stricken pet owners now be tempted to tread a similar path? And this is before we even start to consider the huge implications of human cloning, which the South Korean clinic responsible for the clones of Dylan says it has worked on in the past.

The first clones – of mice, inevitably – were produced almost 40 years ago, so the science is moving relatively slowly. To the layman, we don’t seem to have moved on that far from Dolly, the sheep...