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Science|Tom Brady Says He Cloned His Dog
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/tom-brady-dog-cloning.html
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Mr. Brady became the latest celebrity to try to preserve a pet’s genetics, a move that animal rights groups have criticized.
Nov. 4, 2025, 9:10 p.m. ET
In retirement, Tom Brady, the former star quarterback, found what he called a “second chance.”
Mr. Brady revealed on Tuesday that his dog Junie is actually a clone of another dog he and his ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen, shared that died in late 2023.
Mr. Brady shared the details of the cloning on Tuesday in a news release issued by Colossal Biosciences announcing that it had acquired Viagen, a biotechnology company. Viagen owns the rights to the technology that was used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Mr. Brady, who is an investor in Colossal, said that he had worked with the company a “few years ago” and that the cloning process required a “simple blood draw” from the family’s elderly pit bull mix, Lua, before she died.
“In a few short months, Colossal gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog,” Mr. Brady said.
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Wait, you can clone a pet?
Scientists had long believed that mature cells, like heart cells or kidney cells, had specific functions and couldn’t be reprogrammed. But in the 1990s, a team of Scottish researchers cloned a sheep by taking a cell from its mammary gland; removing its nucleus, which contained the cell’s genetic material; implanting this nucleus into an empty egg cell; and spurring the cell to start dividing.
The scientists transferred the resulting embryo into a surrogate, which led to the birth of Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, in July 1996.
