Back From the Dead: What Dog Cloning Means for Our Human Future
By Osagie K. Obasogie,
Alternet
| 06. 16. 2008
Good Morning America recently televised a world exclusive that caught many pet owners' attention: Dog cloning is now commercially available for people who want to bring their dead and dying companions back to life. Brought to you by BioArts International, a Northern California biotech startup, man and his dead best friend can now be, as the company's marketing slogan states, "Best Friends Again." And again. And again.
But it'll cost you. Rather than taking orders, BioArts will auction off five dog cloning slots in mid-June. Bids start at $100,000.
Despite Good Morning America's numerous awards for excellence in televised journalism, its coverage of this story was not its finest moment. A number of omissions and oversights led the segment to present dog cloning as a largely unproblematic way to deal with the grief of our pets' inevitable deaths. But several untold stories behind this story need to be put front and center.
The ABC morning show presented BioArts' CEO Lou Hawthorne as the next in a long line of pioneering Californian bio executives. But rather than being a new venture...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 04.24.2025
A Review of Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them by Diane M. Tober
A recent journalistic investigation of the global egg trade at Bloomberg put the industry’s unregulated practices and their exploitative implications back in the spotlight. Diane Tober’s book Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them, published in October of last year, delves even more deeply into the industry with a thorough examination of egg...
By Nafeez Ahmed, Byline Times | 04.04.2025
It’s hard to believe, but it’s happening. On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. Among its main concerns was the Smithsonian American Art Museum which, the order complained...
Gray wolf by Jessica Eirich via Unsplash
“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25
Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one...
By Katrina Northrop, The Washington Post | 04.06.2025
photo via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 3.0
China's most infamous scientist is attempting a comeback. He Jiankui, who went to jail for three years after claiming he had created the world's first genetically altered babies, says he remains...
