Renowned Broadway star/actress/singer/director Barbra Streisand, 75, recently told Variety that she cloned her beloved Dog Samantha, not once, but twice. The procedure was done by taking cells from the mouth and stomach of Samantha, giving Streisand two new pups: Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett.
About her cloned dogs, Streisand had this to say: "They have different personalities... I'm waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness." She reportedly put them in different sweaters to tell them apart, colored red and purple.
What did this procedure cost?
Recently, a new company, ViaGen, that bills itself as, “America’s most trusted animal cloning company” has begun charging $50,000 to clone a dog and only $25,000 for a cat, according to Time’s Money Magazine. Since Streisand received two Clones of her former dog, she would have had to pay at least $100,000, plus any additional fees that we don’t know about. To someone who has had as much success as Streisand, this money could be absolutely nothing. However, to the general public, cloning is a world that many of us likely know nothing about. According to a poll by the Today Show on Twitter, most people voted that they would not want to clone their pet.
Barbra Streisand recently revealed that she cloned her late dog. Would you want to clone your pet?
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) February 28, 2018
Some of the reasons people provided beneath the poll includ that it's a waste of money, and that no clone could ever replace the personality and love of the original pet.
It was also pointed out that there are already plenty of animals out in the world waiting to be rescued.
While the science seems to be infallible, Streisand herself said that the new pups aren't carbon copies of her cherished Samantha: so what does that mean for cloning?
Moving forward from animals to humans
While human cloning still hasn't happened yet, we are now closer to it than we have ever been.
The world's first cloned monkeys were revealed in the journal Cell on January 24, 2018. Created in a Shanghai lab, the two monkeys were formerly known as embryos 78 and 79.
A supervisor who worked on the project recently stated that the barrier [of being able to clone an animal so similar to humans] has been broken "to produce animal models that are useful for medicine." While the science is getting closer to human clones, many people argue that we should not be playing God to make it happen.
As for Barbra...
In addition to breaking news headlines with cloning her dogs, Streisand is currently in talks to direct a film based upon Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White, titled "Skinny and Cat." As for performing, Streisand reports that she has too much stage fright to go back to Broadway, and instead has her sights set on starring in a big-screen adaptation of "Gypsy."
The multi-talented star has also been working on a memoir for the last three and a half years, which is a slow process.
Regardless, Streisand is sticking around, whether for cloning her dog or for her actual talents.