The Times Magazine 37is a title that evokes a C-list James Bond
villain, one who wears overly shiny suits and
is intent on disrupting the world order with
armies of cloned panthers. But Russell doesn’t
cut a sinister figure. He describes himself as
a “part-time cowboy” – he and his family and
friends were out roping until almost midnight
the night before. The only time Russell does
resemble a movie villain is when he scoops
up a small white cat with a glittery pink collar,
cradles her in his arms à la Dr Evil and
informs me that her name is Warhawk.
It all started with Dolly. Sort of. In February
1997, scientists at the University of Edinburgh
introduced Dolly the sheep to the world. But
she wasn’t the first animal to be cloned. Back
in 1891, German biologist Hans Driesch created
a pair of sea urchins by splitting a single sea
urchin embryo in half. And in 1903 another
German, embryologist Hans Spemann, formed
salamander larvae after he sliced a salamander
embryo in two using a tiny, delicate hair from
his baby’s head. Decades after that, in 1952,
American scientists Robert Briggs and Thomas
King successfully cloned tadpoles using
nuclear transfer (the same technique that
would be used to create Dolly more than
40 years later), wherein the DNA from an
egg is removed and the nucleus injected with
the DNA of the animal one seeks to clone.
Dolly wasn’t even the first Dolly,
really. Before she was born, there were
277 unsuccessful attempts to clone the six-
year-old Finn Dorset sheep the Edinburgh
scientists had selected for their experiment.
Of those attempts, only 29 resulted in embryos
that were implanted in surrogate mothers,
and of those embryos, Dolly was the only one
that survived to full term.
What made Dolly special – besides her
name, which the research team bestowed
upon her because she was cloned from a
mammary gland cell and they “couldn’t think
of a more impressive pair of glands than
Dolly Parton’s” – was that she was the first
creature to be successfully cloned from an
adult somatic cell. Previously, scientists had
managed to create clones only from embryos,
meaning that the resulting animals were
clones of each other rather than clones of an
existing animal. Clones are, in effect, genetic
twins, and this new technology allowed
scientists to create twins of an animal that
would be born at a later date than the original,
as opposed to at the same time.
After Dolly’s birth, the UN spent years
studying and debating the big, messy ethical
questions of cloning, before releasing, in
2005, its Declaration on Human Cloning,
a document that prohibited, somewhat
ambiguously, “all forms of human cloning
inasmuch as they are incompatible with
human dignity and the protection of human
life”. That didn’t do much to clear up the
confusion, and countries across the globe
began to adopt their own laws regarding
human cloning. Some, like France and
Germany, banned it outright, while others,
like the UK, banned reproductive cloning- cloning with the goal of creating a newborn
baby that is genetically identical to another
human – but allowed the use of cloned human
embryos for biomedical research.
In the US, there was a backlash from
animal rights groups. But for every objector,
it seemed, there were just as many consumers
out there willing to pay big money to get their
favourite animals duplicated and triplicated.
It was here that ViaGen founder John
Sperling saw an opportunity. Sperling – the
“Howard Hughes of biotech” according to
Wired – was an eccentric billionaire with
a keen interest in genetic and longevity
research. A year after the Dolly announcement,
he donated millions to help fund a dog-
cloning project that became known as the
“Missyplicity Project”, after Missy, the husky-
mix that Sperling intended to clone. (Though
the original Missy died in 2002, four clones
were eventually produced in 2007 and 2008.)
Sperling started collecting existing patents
and intellectual property related to cloning
and amassed a team of experts who would be
able to make his commercial cloning dreams
a reality. He started with the science side, then
brought in businesspeople, including Russell,
who was working for a UK-based animal
breeder called PIC (Pig Improvement
Company), to help sell the dream.
It became Russell’s job to make a new,
ever evolving and still ethically confusing
practice appear appealing, approachable and
dependable – a task to which he seemed
preternaturally well suited. He exudes
the kind of appealing, approachable and
dependable energy necessary to calm a
skittish horse – or make a tough sale.
ViaGen started with livestock. Cloning
is popular with farmers and ranchers, who
use it to optimise desirable characteristics in
cattle, pigs and sheep by cloning and breeding
the animals with the strongest genes. Over
time, the cloning process evolved and became
increasingly reliable. Researchers became
more efficient at drawing out DNA from
genetic samples and creating viable embryos.
About five years ago, the company expanded
its services to offer the cloning of companion
animals, and in 2018 Russell decided to
separate pet and equine operations from
the rest of the business.
“When you’re cloning a companion animal,
it’s a whole different set of emotions,” Russell
explains. “It just became clear to us, ‘Hey,
these things are going in different directions.’ ”
In an anonymous beige office complex,
ViaGen Pets & Equine is tucked between a
physical therapist’s office and an audiovisual
company. Inside, the walls are covered in
blown-up photographs of clients’ clones,
each emblazoned along the bottom with
“VIAGEN”: fuzzy kittens; a pair of identical
dobermans; a sweet foal; and two jaunty
poodle puppies standing next to an older
dog, their antecedent poodle.
At the back of the office is a lab where
staffers process the DNA from the tissue-
sample collection kits that they send out
to clients. In order to ensure the tissue is in
good enough condition for DNA collection,
the company recommends that owners (or,
preferably, their vets) biopsy pets while they’re
alive or, at the very latest, within the first few
days after a pet’s death. (When Sanaz Arenivas,
ViaGen’s cell culture manager, explains to
me the difficulty of cloning genetic material
that hasn’t been properly preserved, I nod
and mentally scratch off, “Can Jurassic Park
happen and when?” from my list of questions.)
Once a DNA sample arrives at the lab,
ViaGen harvests living cells from the sample.
If the client doesn’t want to clone the pet
immediately, the cells are frozen and stored in
one of the company’s massive cryogenic vats,
where they can be kept indefinitely, until the
client is ready to clone. When the time comes,
the scientists perform a procedure called
somatic cell nuclear transfer, taking the cloned
cell of the original pet and implanting it into
the nucleus of a female’s egg. Once the cloned
embryo has successfully started to grow in
the egg, the egg is implanted into a surrogate
mother, who carries the egg to term andCloned horses may be at
the Paris Olympics 2024.
But given the secrecy, it’s
possible no one will know
Polo star Adolfo
Cambiaso, a regular
ViaGen client