Blogtrek

Copycat

The revelation that Cc, a genetic clone of a calico cat named Rainbow, not only does not look like Rainbow, but has a personality radically different from her, is of extraordinary importance. It says that cloning is not what we figured it was. One can't make a copy of a person simply by putting his genes into a zygote and bringing it to term. But identical twins are so much like each other that they can't be told apart. I know from experience, when I met a pair of such twins. They are certainly closer than Cc and Rainbow. This means the womb must have something to do with it. It seems that if two cats are genetically identical but grew in different wombs, they become two different looking cats. I would suspect the same if the two had grown in the same womb but not at the same time, but am not certain of this. Two identical twins grew in the same womb at the same time, so this accounts for their near identicalness. So it seems that people who want to make a copy of themselves for posterity can forget about it. It is a major finding in our understanding of life and of ourselves, and of course, of cats. Meow.