MIT Technology Review reporter supports drugs to extend pets’ lives and rejects $50 000 cloning and storage of dead animals in liquid nitrogen

MIT Technology Review reporter supports drugs to extend pets’ lives and rejects $50 000 cloning and storage of dead animals in liquid nitrogen

On October 16, MIT Technology Review published an essay by biomedical reporter Jessica Hamzelou. She begins with Peppy, the cat who disappeared during her childhood, and examines drugs, cloning, and cryonics.

Peppy disappeared when Hamzelou was ten. Searches through fields and woods until sunset turned up nothing. She never learned how or when the cat died. Almost thirty years later, owners are being offered more and more ways that might give them additional time with their pets.

The first approach is medication. Loyal’s lead drug, LOY-002, is a daily pill for dogs aged ten and older. The company describes it as a treatment intended to extend life by increasing insulin sensitivity and lowering insulin levels. Around 1300 dogs in the STAY trial receive either the drug or a placebo. According to Loyal, this is the final efficacy trial for its FDA approval application. The FDA has accepted two of the three main data packages required for conditional approval, covering preliminary efficacy and safety; the manufacturing package is still in progress. Hamzelou would certainly have tried to obtain a drug that could have protected Peppy from diabetes or arthritis, but her enthusiasm ends there.

The second approach is cloning, offered to people seeking a replacement for a pet that has died. Typically, the pet’s DNA is placed in an egg cell from another animal of the same species, and a surrogate carries the embryo. Viagen Pets charges $50 000 to clone a cat or dog and describes the service on its website as “a way to never let go” of a pet. The result is a genetic twin: CC, the world’s first cloned cat, had the same genes as her donor, Rainbow, but a slightly different coat pattern because of developmental factors.

Lori Kogan, a professor at Colorado State University who studies relationships between people and animals, sees no problem with cloning. When a person dies, there are funerals, time off work, and memorial gifts. Few established customs exist for the death of a pet, so owners may experience “disenfranchised grief”: their feelings go unacknowledged, leaving them isolated. If a clone brings an owner peace, Kogan says, “who are we to judge?”

Hamzelou agrees with Kogan, but notes that losing a pet is often a child’s first encounter with death. She likes to think that losing Peppy helped prepare her for losses in adulthood. She wants her own children to understand that death is final and that an individual animal cannot be recreated, replaced, or brought back to life.

The third approach, cryonics, promises revival. For a fee, several companies cool dead pets to very low temperatures and store them in the hope that future technology will bring them back to life and cure whatever caused their deaths. Alcor, a cryonics organization in Arizona, stores its members’ pets alongside humans in liquid nitrogen at −196 °C. Tomorrow Bio charges between €30 000 and €150 000 to preserve a pet.

Hamzelou puts the chances of seeing a pet again at close to zero: even people working in the industry acknowledge that revival is unlikely. In its FAQ section, Alcor itself states that small roundworms survive cooling below −100 °C, but no large animal has been preserved and revived. Scientists still struggle to preserve many individual organs, so that achievement is likely decades away. Hamzelou misses Peppy, but would decline to have her stored in liquid nitrogen or cloned. The essay ends: “Rest in peace, one and only Peppy.”