In brief
- Colossal announced acquiring pet cloning Viagen earlier this week.
- The company claims cloned pets live full life spans
- Critics accused Colossal of “playing God” as cloning raises ethics and welfare questions
Seven-time Super Bowl Champion, Tom Brady, stepped into one of biotechnology’s thorniest debates this week when he revealed that his dog Junie was a genetic clone of Lua, the pit bull mix he once shared with his ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen.
The disclosure placed one of the world’s most famous athletes at the center of a growing commercial market for pet cloning. The field continues to raise ethical questions about animal welfare, scientific oversight, and how far private companies should push genetic engineering.
Brady said Texas-based Colossal Biosciences had created Junie using a blood draw taken shortly before Lua died in late 2023.
“Tom is an advisor and an investor in Colossal, which is how we originally began discussing the possibility of cloning Lua,” Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, told Decrypt. “Tom continues to provide critical advice and insights to Colossal’s mission.”
Brady’s involvement with the projects extends beyond the customer, with the former quarterback working alongside the biotech company.
“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,” Brady told ABCNews. “In a few short months, Colossal gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog.”
On Tuesday, Colossal announced its acquisition of Viagen, the Texas firm that held rights to the technology used to clone Dolly the sheep by scientists at the Roslin Institute in 1996.
Viagen had long been a central player in the companion-animal cloning business.
The company previously cloned dogs for Paris Hilton and Barbra Streisand and said it had cloned 15 species, including a black-footed ferret and Przewalski’s horse. Its acquisition supported Colossal’s broader cloning ambitions.
“Viagen’s success in companion-animal cloning has been critical to their ability to develop and optimize their world-class cloning technologies and expertise,” James said.
“By using this model to fund and drive this technological development, we have been able to unlock and improve tools that drive progressive conservation efforts. This type of approach to conservation complements and accelerates Colossal’s species restoration and preservation mission.”
Colossal Bioscience’s work drew broad attention earlier this year when the company said it had produced three “dire wolves,” puppies that carried dire wolf DNA.
That effort relied on ancient DNA extracted from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone, which scientists engineered into a modern wolf cell line.
The resulting puppies, Remus, Romulus, and Khaleesi, were part of what Colossal described as a long-term de-extinction and conservation program that involved partnerships with conservationists and Indigenous groups.
‘Playing God’
When asked whether these projects amounted to “playing God,” Colossal founder Ben Lamm told Decrypt humans had already crossed that threshold.
“We play God every day,” he said. “We’re on track to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity by 2050.”
Adding to the ethics question around cloning pets, dogs especially, is what type of lifespan the new dog will have. A July 2022 study in Nature of 1,000 cloned dogs found that only about 2% of attempts led to a living puppy and that roughly 20 cloned dogs died shortly after birth.
James, however, said Viagen’s data showed that cloned animals lived normal lives.
“With more than 20 years of cloning experience, Viagen has been able to show that cloned animals live the same length and quality of life as their counterparts,” he said.
Animal-rights groups warned that the industry remained opaque and lightly regulated, with high rates of failed pregnancies and early neonatal deaths during the cloning process.
In a 2018 article, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) criticized Streisand’s decision to clone her dog, noting that millions of adoptable animals were already in shelters.
“Cloning is a horror show: a waste of lives, time, and money,” PETA said in a statement. “The suffering that such experiments cause is unimaginable. There is no good excuse for it, and it should be ended now.”
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) took an even stronger stance, calling for a moratorium on the research, promotion, and sale of cloned and bioengineered pets. The organization said reports of anatomical and physiological problems in cloned mammals raised unresolved welfare concerns.
“It is difficult to document fully the consequences of cloning or bioengineered applications of companion animals since many of these activities fall outside the framework of publicly funded and regulated research programs,” the group said in a post. “While this work is privately funded, it does demand public attention and scrutiny.”
Despite these concerns, Colossal said it worked to ensure “optimal welfare” for the animals it clones.
“We have robust welfare monitoring tools and strategies to consistently track those metrics,” James said.
“Additionally, the tools and techniques that have been developed and optimized through Viagen’s processes are only available because of their work and are applied to projects of conservation significance, which also ensures the welfare of critically endangered species and ecosystems,” James added.
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