Apollo 2.0

So I was making my daily rounds on the internet and browsing the latest news on MSNBC's website, when the below headline (and article) caught my eye:

Cloned pit bull puppies revealed. All five of him.

As it turned out there was a woman who decided to have her pit pull cloned... AFTER the dog had already died. There is a biotech firm in Korea named RNL Bio who performed the cloning procedure from skin cells of the dog. Of course, the procedure wasn't cheap - it cost the lady from California $50,000 for this "service." Something else that will obviously be of debate is the ethical dilemma to this event that has raised furious debates from supporters on both sides - who are we to play God?

Supreme deities aside, I was quite surprised and intrigued at the sudden thought of how this could affect my life. While it's expensive and filled with potential complications (and who knows if the company will guarantee a definite successful clone and/or promise there won't be any side-effects) the procedure will eventually become cheaper. If indeed in about a decade or so's time the price drops by... say 1/2 so that it's about the same cost as that of a new car, and the results have been successful and positive, it really has gotten me thinking.



What if I had a second chance to raise Apollo? Or even a third chance? While it will obviously NOT be Apollo because of the way that each clone will be brought up in a different social environment and might be trained differently - on paper he is the same puppy to begin with, and will ultimately have more or less the same physical attributes. I will know any potential problems that Apollo 1.0 has (or will) experience and adjust for those things accordingly. I'll also be offered the chance to perhaps raise him a different way and train him in the ways that was most effective. Last but not least, he'll LOOK more or less the same and have the same genetic personality that should carry over into Apollo 2.0's characteristic traits.

What an intriguing world we live in... where we make the impossible, possible. I look forward to potentially spending the rest of my life, growing old, with the "same" dog.