For Animals, People, and Those In Between, we were asked to create another character study, this time based on research of a real animal. I chose Mira, one of the first dogs to be cloned from a pet. She lives in Mill Valley, CA, with the owner of BioArts International (previously Genetic Savings & Clone), Lou Hawthorne, and his seven-year-old son. With the help of Dr. Hwang Suk (infamous for falsely reporting successful cloning of human embryos in 2004), Hawthorne cloned Mira from a tissue sample taken from his mother’s Husky/Border Collie mix, Missy. In order to create each clone, a sample of Missy’s nuclear DNA was fused with another dog’s egg which had been stripped of its DNA. The resulting embryo was then implanted in the uterine lining of a third dog. Three other clones of Missy are still living, one in the Bay Area, one in Boulder, CO, and one in Phoenix, AZ. Two other clones died of parvovirus as newborns. Missy was, according to her owners, incredibly beautiful and obedient. She had a superior intellect, a phenomenal temperament, and a majestic plume of a tail. She also had a tendency to steal socks. In Mira and the other clones, says Hawthorne, “All these qualities are represented,” as is a love of broccoli, a taste not common in dogs, but shared by Missy.

There is very little information available about Mira that describes her without mentioning Missy in the same breath. Often, Mira is simply referred to as “Missy’s clone.” This lack of information is understandable, given that Mira’s genetic relationship to Missy is the only newsworthy thing about her. However, so much information is available about Missy– her personality, her looks, and her behavior have been written about at length– that the disparity between the two seems strange. Although Mira is a family’s pet dog, she will always be described according to another dog’s traits. Descriptions of Mira will continually be based on the dogs who came before her and who, whether through tissue donation or as part of the experiments that led to the success of the Missyplicity project, contributed to her existence.

Sources:

Aldhous, P. Interview: It’s a dog’s life…again. New Scientist, July 19, 2008. 199:2665, Pg. 44.

BioArts International. Best Friends Again: Cloning Missy. Retrieved March 3, 2009 from http://bestfriendsagain.com/missyplicity/index.html.

Konigsburg, E. Beloved Pets Everlasting? The New York Times, January 1, 2009. Section D; Pg. 1.