As mentioned last post about video greeting cards, and a while ago about AI, sometimes the Future is slow to arrive.
A very personal example is when Alan and Priscilla went to clone their cat Kingsford. Back in 2002, for his end-of-course project in Developmental Biology at SOU, Alan investigated what and how long it might take to clone Kingsford, and started on some of the first steps.
Spoiler Alert: Kingsford never got cloned.
Dolly the sheep was all the rage when she was the first mammal cloned, back in 1997. By 2002, private industry was starting to gear up for commercial pet cloning.
Kingsford was 17 years old at the time, so his Future was not so bright. Cloning him seemed like a great science project, especially after the first cat, CC, was cloned commercially.
The reported cost for CC was $50,000, but being familiar with Moore’s law, Alan figured it was just a matter of time before cloning Kingsford became economically practical. As part of the project, Alan applied Moore’s law and estimated it would be about 10 years before the cost was under $1000.
The other big part of the project was figuring out how to save Kingsford’s DNA for those 10 years. Being elderly already, Kingsford visited the vet often; it was simple enough to ask the vet to extract a few cheek cells. The challenge was freezing them in such a way that they would be viable a decade later. That was the real science part of the project.
That decade of course has now turned into well over two, and the SOU freezer holding Kingsford’s frozen cells has likely failed and been replaced since then. Given the price for pet cloning remains around $50,000, Alan has moved on to other Future projects.
But he does still maintain a cloning piggy bank on his bookshelf, just in case.
