Tom Brady: collector of rings, questionable investments, and now, cloned curiosities.
Yes, you read that right. In an interview with People Magazine on Tuesday, the longtime Patriots quarterback revealed that his current pooch, Junie, is a clone of his late dog, Lua, who passed away nearly two years ago.
He also took the opportunity to reveal that the dog was cloned by Colossal Biosciences, a biotech startup known for its “de-extinction” initiatives and which made headlines earlier this year for claiming to bring back the long dead dire wolf. Brady, of course, is an investor in Colossal.
Lua, a bulldog mix, died in December 2023. According to Brady, she was cloned with a blood sample collected before her passing.
“I love my animals. They mean the world to me and my family,” the septuple Super Bowl champion said. “A few years ago, I worked with Colossal and leveraged their non-invasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family’s elderly dog before she passed.”
Colossal, he added, “gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog.”
Brady’s duplicated dog is another example of the burgeoning and already lucrative world of animal cloning. To many, the idea remains creepy. But by bringing back clones of people’s cherished but perished pets, the practice has gained some traction among the rich and/or famous, since at present it remains prohibitively expensive.
Arguably the leading cloning company is ViaGen Pets & Equine, which famously provided Barbara Streisand not one, not two, but three clones of her Coton de Tuléar, and claims to have cloned hundreds of other pets. One customer had the same horse cloned 50 times, its chief executive told The Atlantic. Another company, Trans Ova Genetics, makes its bread by duplicating livestock. Needless to say, the practice has come a long way since Dolly the sheep became the world’s first cloned mammal made from an adult cell back in 1996.
Another way genetic cloning has captured public attention is through efforts to resurrect long extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, as Colossal, the company Brady has invested in, claims to be doing by creating “woolly mice” that replicate the dead mammal’s shaggy pelt.
Though Colossal claims that bringing back these creatures will provide some sort of environmental and scientific good, many scientists view the altruistic premise as spurious at best — embodied by the company’s incredible assertion that unleashing hordes of mammoths onto the Arctic could save the region’s imperiled permafrost from climate change by packing down the ice with their heavy footsteps.
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