Should You Be Able to Clone Your Pet?

Thanks to advances in technology, scientists can extract cells from an animal and implant them into a surrogate mother. If all goes well, an animal with the same genes as the original—an identical twin—will be born. In the past 15 years, sheep, dogs, and cats have been successfully cloned. Some companies now offer pet-cloning services.

That's the Introduction to a Debate set up by Junior Scholastic between Blake Russell, the CEO of Viagen, Inc. (a livestock-cloning company based in Austin, Texas) and Pete Shanks, an author and consultant for the Center for Genetics and Society, which is based in Berkeley, California.

The Debate was published on February 27, 2012.