Living In BLADE RUNNER: Pet Cloning, Stem Cell Operation Comes to Los Angeles
The LA Business Journal paints a fascinating picture of this place:
Patients seeking one of the most complicated and experimental therapies in medicine have been descending not on UCLA or Cedars-Sinai but on a small corner storefront in the Koreatown Galleria.
There, upstairs from a grocery and alongside stores selling handbags and Hello Kitty dolls, sufferers of arthritis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other hard-to-treat diseases have been seeking relief.
If this doesn’t sound like the eyeball shop in Blade Runner, I don’t know what does.
RNL Bio doesn’t do stem cell therapy here - instead you pay $10-30,000 to go to Japan, China or Tijuana, have your fatty tissue stem cells sucked out and sent to Maryland for work, then sent back and placed inside you again. This, of course, is not FDA-approved, and is potentially risky.
The company delivered their first cloned pet to a California woman in 2008; since then about 10 other people have paid at least $100,000 to get their beloved pooch or kitten replicated.
A storefront cloning and bioengineering company. That’s flat out science fiction, and we’re living in it. Now if RNL Bio could just do the work on premises - maybe in a really cramped freezer space filled with eyeballs - we’d be a couple of Spinners away from the future.
