How Barbra Streisand bends the laws of nature to defy death

Perhaps she was thinking of her hit You Don’t Bring Me Flowers when arriving theatrically at her dead dog Sammi’s plush graveside, with neither lilies or white roses. Instead, she was papped with two identical clones poking their heads out of her designer shopping trolley. Clones of Sammi, that is, not Streisand. That would just be weird.

Simply by taking these wee aberrations to visit what is essentially their own grave, the mourning US songstress had risked what’s sexily referred to as a paradox. This is when the fundamental laws that govern reality are unexpectedly broken and the confused universe simply swallows itself out of existence.

But relax – Sammi’s double resurrection seems to prove that unnatural twists in nature’s tapestry actually don’t cause reality to end. Finding out Ronan Farrow really is Woody Allan’s biological son might do it, but Barbra Streisand’s dogs paying their last respects to themselves? The universe is fine with that.

Sammi’s pampered LA lifestyle would doubtlessly have endowed her with some sense of entitlement, but she surely never assumed a form of eternal life was her destiny. She likely assumed it was just a bit of lipo when the vet took some belly skin as a DNA sample for cloning.

Still, they could have afforded Sammi a little deathbed dignity and waited until she passed away before slicing bits off. A dog’s genetics can be cloned up to five days after death and, for reasons unknown, cats just three days. Maybe because they’ve likely used up a few lives already.

The commercialisation of cloning means Happy Days Are Here Again for Streisand, who now has three dogs – two identical clones and another unrelated one called Fanny. “Every time I look at their faces, I think of my Sammi and smile,” she said. And Sammi smiles back. With her two new mouths and Fanny.

MAMMOTH TUSK AHEAD FOR CLONING TEAM

PERHAPS there are countless clones out there, failed black market experiments imprisoned in secret labs with only their second heads for company. Officially, however, the first commercial cloning operation opened for business in 2005 in Seoul. Somewhat ironically for South Korea, the first animal they gave life to was a dog.

It’s unknown just how many cloned animals now exist worldwide, but Sooam Biotech Research Foundation claim they have resurrected 800 pets since that first dog – each costing around £75,000. The other big global player is ViaGen Pets in Texas – boasting Barbara Streisand as a satisfied customer – who claim to have produced thousands of “happy, healthy” animals.

The complex process begins when a tissue sample is taken – some skin and a wee bit of muscle. The nucleus – all the genetic information – is then removed from the egg cell of a donor animal and the DNA of your beloved four-legged friend is then injected in. When the embryo develops, it is then transplanted into a surrogate dog’s womb. About 100 tins of Chappie later, ker-ching.

Sooam’s controversial “bad boy of genetics” Dr Hwang Woo Suk, who once claimed to have cloned human cells, has a grander vision than simple canine reproduction however. He is confident he will soon bring back the mighty woolly mammoth from extinction. Suk was recently seen in darkest, coldest Siberia, drilling DNA-rich cells from the well-preserved bones of a 28,000-year-old frozen mammoth. He also has plans to produce miniature pigs to host organs for transplanting. Puts my own ambitions of simply getting out of bed in the morning into perspective.

Such taboo tinkering, however, has invoked the ire of the Humane Society of the United States, and the organisation’s Vicki Katrinak had harsh words for death deniers like Streisand – and the cloning firms they use. “They prey on grieving pet owners, giving them a false promise,” she said. “Cloning doesn’t replicate a pet’s personality.”

Perhaps Katrinak is right and there can only be one version of you in the end – that nurture trumps nature and it’s simply our experiences that shape us. Fear not though, our own clones won’t have any memories to form a personality – they’ll be kept alive in comas for eventual organ harvesting when we destroy the real McCoy with ciggies, junk food and bevvy.

SCOTLAND'S NOT DOLLY

IN a delicious irony, it’s possible that cloned mammoths may actually be the only creatures left once the long-overdue new Ice Age finally arrives. Let’s hope they don’t like bread, milk or a paper in the morning.

Such climate change will make the Beast From The East look like summer on Mercury, so it’s a shame no-one will be around to savour such schadenfreude – or to recall that cloning actually first took place in a landmass once known as Scotland. Even if this copy of the Sunday Herald somehow survives our extinction event, mammoths can’t read.

It’s understandable that even we ourselves might forget some of the seismic achievements on our soil, such is the abundance of Caledonian scientific ingenuity since the Industrial Revolution. In which, incidentally, we also played a major part thanks to James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine. It’s a formidable legacy that’s dizzying to absorb. Especially with recent notable achievements like chicken tikka masala and Irn-Bru Xtra.

Less colloquial breakthroughs over the past last few months have seen Scotland once again stookie a seismic dent into the global scientific landscape, with innovations in satellite tech, gravitational wave detection, profound AI advancements and the no small matter of the biggest-selling piece of entertainment ever – Grand Theft Auto. Like Rocky Balboa against Ivan Drago, we punch well above our weight and can climb snow-capped mountains with nothing but a tammy and leather jaikit oan.

Self-serving “Wha’s like us?” conceit is a heady, dangerous drug, but it’s still exhilarating to run though a list of Scottish inventions – fingerprinting, whisky, gin, toilet flushes, colour photography, TV, fridges, penicillin, bicycles, golf, the decimal point, toasters, tyres, anaesthetics, iron bridges, flasks, logarithms and telephones. Oh, and the hypodermic syringe. Yet it must be noted we weren’t first to synthesise heroin.

Trainspotting, however, did rule global pop culture in 1996, and it was also the year researchers at the prestigious Roslin Institute in Midlothian reaffirmed our prominent place in the world’s scientific community with the first ever animal clone, Dolly the Sheep.

It doesn’t sound so long ago, but this was an almost unrecognisable pre-digital era where the Gallagher brothers were constantly battling, a controversial US president was accused of extramarital proclivities and the Tories were in meltdown with a resurgent Labour waiting in the wings. If history does repeat itself, perhaps our next scientific revolution isn’t so far away.