“Life finds a way” is one of the most memorable quotes from the Jurassic Park movies, which is a franchise built on the idea of scientists bringing long-extinct dinosaurs back to life. It feels promising at the start, letting people get a second chance with creatures lost to time… until, well, everything goes south and a park full of apex predators starts chasing down and murdering tourists, civilians.
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Truly a wild plot that the movie franchise runs with. And Julian Edelman is hoping nothing like that crosses over to the real world now that his former teammate Tom Brady has cloned a dog.
Edelman’s comment was lighthearted, but he genuinely seemed surprised that Brady managed to get a “second chance with a clone of our beloved dog.” The clone is of his late pet, Lua, a pitbull mix who passed away in 2023. Lua was a big part of the family, including Brady’s ex-wife Gisele Bundchen and their kids.
The cloning was handled by Colossal Biosciences, the parent company that recently acquired Viagen, which carried out the actual procedure. Their process is no walk in the park too, as it involves gene editing and creating hybrids that are as close to the original animal as possible.
They have even revived the dire wolf, which went extinct roughly thirteen thousand years ago. So it makes sense that Edelman and fellow former teammate Rob Gronkowski are a bit confused and have plenty of questions about how Brady ended up cloning his dog.
“I got at least 20 questions,” Gronkowski said on his podcast with Julian, Dudes on Dudes.
“One thing I hear is that the personality doesn’t stay the same. But the looks stay the same,” added the former TE when his co-host pressed him on it. Still, Gronk made it clear he is no expert and had a whole mix of questions, some normal and some completely out there.
“Where’s the bones come from? Where’s the brain cells come from? Where’s the brain matter… Where does the intestine come from? Where does his hot dog and [expletive] come from? How is it all formed Jules?” he piled on.
And surely enough, Edelman didn’t have much clarification either. “So, is this straight Jurassic Park? I hope Tom didn’t use the other DNA part of the frog. They can reproduce themselves. And this dog could go out of control,” the former wideout said.
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The frog reference basically traces back to the movie’s plot, where the scientists used frog DNA to fill the gaps in the dinosaur DNA they had recovered. All the clones were then made female to prevent breeding, but since frog DNA can allow some species to change sex, a few dinosaurs turned male. That led to breeding, and, well, life finding a way. Edelman joked that he hopes that’s not the case with Brady’s cloned dog, Junie.
Edelman was probably not aware that this is a non-invasive form of cloning that uses a simple blood sample instead of a tissue biopsy. The process is more humane and far less stressful for the animal. So Junie is simply another dog, but for Brady, she’s a second chance to spend life with a beloved pet.
Brady shared the news on November 4, revealing that the cloning cost him around fifty thousand dollars. And he is not the first to do it. Paris Hilton has cloned her dog before, and so has Barbra Streisand (twice). The first cloned dog goes back to 2005, so the research has certainly come a long way since then.
