Got $100k? Enter to Win a Canine Clone

Do I hear $100,000?

$150,000?

$200,000?

For the right price, a California biotech startup will clone dogs for five lucky bidders in the world’s first commercial dog cloning program. BioArts International opens a series of online auctions June 18, when people around the world can bid to have their four-legged friends “duplicated.” Bidding starts at $100,000.

BioArts chief executive Lou Hawthorne, who recently succeeded in a decade-long quest to clone his family dog, spearheads the program. Hawthorne (pictured with his cloned dogs) partners with Hwang Woo-suk, a South Korean scientist who led the effort to produce the world’s first canine clone in 2005. Hwang is also known for a series of embezzlement and bioethics law violations linked to fake stem cell research.

News of the BioArts auction is sure to spark debate among dog owners for both its controversy and opportunity. One one hand, the Humane Society argues that commercial pet cloning has no social value and may lead to increased animal suffering. On the other, Hawthorne views biotechnology as path to happiness for pet owners.

But can the scientists at BioArts duplicate an animal’s personality? When I was young, my family’s dog passed away after a long battle with cancer. I was devastated; I had grown up with Sam around, and his unique personality was a big part of our family. Even if cloning were possible at the time, I doubt the process could have replicated Sam the way we knew him.

The debate over pet cloning also raises the issue of homeless animals. The Humane Society makes a strong case for animal adoption over animal replication. Wouldn’t pet owners be doing society (and the animals involved) a favor to adopt animals from shelters rather than pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into an attempt at producing a genetic duplicate?

Will Hawthorne and his team at BioArts oversee an international bidding war of dramatic proportions in June? Or will the price of cloning prove to be too high for an untested market? Whether pet owners have $100k to spare or not, the auction will surely get people thinking—and arguing—about the ethics of pet cloning.

Continuing Coverage: Abortion as Art

The debate around Aliza Shvarts' abortion as art project/social commentary continues as Yale officials now say that without a disclaimer clearly stating the entire project is a work of fiction/hoax and contains no human blood, and is merely performance art.

"In this case, we will not permit her to install the project unless she submits a clear and unambiguous written statement that her installation is a work of fiction: that she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages, and that no human blood will be physically displayed in her installation," Peter Salovey, dean of Yale College, said in the statement.

Additionally, Yale officials have said that Shvartz' advisers made serious errors in judgment in approving the project once they were aware of the controversial nature of the piece; the faculty involved have apparently been spoken to with "appropriate action" taken.

Now, this raises even further questions for me. First - if Shvarts presented the project to her faculty advisers as a performance piece/hoax project designed to get the rise that is has been out of us chatty media commentators, why would the faculty raise questions, or seek additional approval? On the face of it, if you want to believe that this is a performance piece and not actually what Shvartz says it is - the result of repeated attempts to inseminate and then herbaly abort resulting pregnancies - then what's the problem? Gelatin, food colouring, plastic, a controversial artist statement, and the precise results any performance artist is hoping to achieve. And if she lied to the advisers, why does this then become something that they should be punished for?

Secondly, the automatic ban on art that contains human body fluids/cast-offs strikes me as stepping very close to censoring art because it is controversial. Many modern, performance, and even "traditional" artists work in human fluids - is this really the appropriate response for officials to have to controversial art?

At this point, unless someone goes in with Luminol or DNA swabs and then runs PCRs, etc, we're never going to know if she actually did what she said - in a way, it's a wonderful example of just how flexible truth and knowledge actually is.
-Kelly Hills

Abortion as Art Debate Continues

Aliza Shvarts abortion as art Yale senior art project is continuing to create controversy. Originally billed as a student deliberately impregnating and aborting over the span of many months, and saving the fluids for an art project, was labeled fictitious performance art by Yale - a statement Shvarts immediately called inaccurate:

Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant. No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen, Shvarts said, because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.

Well, at least we are now starting to see bits and pieces of an artist's statement - something I'm still trying to track down.

But Yale isn't happy with this latest development, with the dean of the art school, as well as Yale proper, speaking out against this, and discussing how future senior projects will be reviewed, supervised, and approved.

Shvarts is right - we'll never know what "the truth" of this situation is. But that's not necessarily the point; truth isn't always needed to have discussion, to consider possibilities and what if's. And my problem with this entire situation is both narrow and broad in scope. Narrowly speaking, as a student myself, I'm irritated with the very idea of someone so blatantly causing trouble that will then turn around and impact other students - future art students are going to have a lot more grief and oversight and hoops to jump through because of Shvarts, and that seems almost intuitively unfair, and selfish. There's an element of "about-me at the expense of others" to the piece that I simply find distasteful.

But the broader concern is over art in general, and who supervises it - especially bioart.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of DIY biotech and the art that comes out of the movemet. The Critical Art Ensemble is one of my favourite performance art groups, and I love how thought provoking their biotech projects are. And as it becomes easier and easier to grow your own biotech, we're going to see more artists using biological materials in their work. The difficulty of Kac's Alba the GFP Bunny is going to give way to homebrewed experiments and art - sort of literally. As is, the walls of my office are decorated with art from students using osteoblasts to make things as diverse as religious symbols and art highlighting the life cycle of Pacific Northwest trees; freshmen and sophomores with no biology background spending 5 weeks in a basically equipped lab, making fascinating and interesting art. (I still wish I had a picture of the spiral nebula one student made out of her DNA. Figuring out how to photograph that one was a challenge!)

As DIY biotech becomes easier, as more artists begin to question what it means to use our bodies as art, interactive with the world, or any number of other justified reasons, we're going to hit these boundaries. These points that might generate a yuck or a wince or a deep-seated intuitive response; and what do we do then? Where do we draw the line? Art has often pushed boundaries, and in general we allow for the freedom of the artist to engage in whatever work they want, so long as it breaks no laws. That's part of art, to push and make us think, re-evaluate.

Are we going to need to change this idea in the face of DIY biotech and bioart? Are some sort of reviews of bioart proposals necessary? Does it need to be vetted by an ethicist, some sort of specialist? Or at least supported? Is it even a valid area for an ethicist to get into, or does it become antithesis to the entire idea of art, having someone approve or deny the process itself?

Shvarts is certainly getting debate and dialogue over her art project - I'm just not certain it's the dialogue she was hoping to create.
-Kelly Hills