The big picture: cloned dogs Ken and Henry

Ken and Henry were catahoula-doberman crosses owned by a Lafayette veterinarian named Phillip Dupont. A year or two before this picture was taken, Dupont and his wife Paula decided that they couldn’t face losing their beloved dog, Melvin, who was nearing the end of his life, so they sent a skin sample containing his DNA to Sooam Biotech in South Korea. Scientists at the lab injected Melvin’s DNA into a donor egg and implanted the resulting embryo inside the womb of a surrogate. A couple of months later, two healthy pups were born – clones whose resemblance to the original was by all accounts uncanny.

Prior took the photograph on assignment, to illustrate an article about cloning, but the uncanniness fits in with his wider oeuvre. It’s on full display in his new monograph Slip Me the Master Key, which captures, in varied and often elliptical ways, a world sliding towards a strange and disconcerting future. We glimpse it in the ashen face of a woman being primed for a facelift in New York; in a petri dish of microplastics from the Atlantic; in the chandelier-like interior of a quantum computer.

And we glimpse it in these dogs lounging on an old vet’s table in Louisiana. Behind their relaxed demeanours lies a controversial practice which, if taken to its logical conclusion, could alter the makeup of life. The Duponts paid $100,000 to clone their dog. One puppy died in the process and a great deal of animal suffering often occurs before healthy clones are delivered. Meanwhile, rescue centres are inundated with dogs in desperate need of rehoming. For all that Ken and Henry eased the Duponts’ grief when Melvin died, you can’t help thinking they could have found a cheaper, less ethically fraught way of addressing their predicament. 

Slip Me the Master Key by Thomas Prior is published by Loose Joints

Photograph by Thomas Prior