Tom Brady can apparently outplay time. Now he’s testing whether he can outsmart it, too.
This week, the seven-time Super Bowl champion revealed that his current dog, Junie, isn’t just a pet — she’s a clone. Specifically, a genetic duplicate of his late pit-bull mix, Lua, who passed away in 2023. The revelation came during an interview that seemed headed toward the usual “life after football” fare until Brady casually dropped that his new dog was “technically the same Lua — just… younger.”
Somewhere, Dr. Frankenstein just nodded approvingly.
The cloning was handled by Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based biotech firm best known for its moonshot plans to “de-extinct” species like the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger. Brady’s not only a client but an investor. So yes, the guy who spent his career reading defensive lines now owns a piece of the company trying to re-engineer lost species — and, apparently, beloved dogs.
Colossal says the process used to recreate Lua was “non-invasive,” relying on a small blood sample preserved before her death. The cell nucleus was then inserted into a donor egg, implanted into a surrogate dog, and out came Junie — a genetic twin born into an entirely different decade.
If that sentence didn’t make you pause, you’ve spent too much time on the internet.
The Celebrity Clone Club
Brady’s hardly alone. Barbra Streisand famously cloned her Coton de Tulear, Sammie, in 2018 — twice. Business magnate Simon Cowell has reportedly expressed interest in doing the same for his Yorkshire terriers. What’s changed is the cultural temperature: when Streisand did it, it felt like mad-scientist novelty. Now it’s part of a booming, if morally murky, industry.
Pet cloning can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000. Companies like ViaGen and Colossal pitch it as emotional continuity — a way to keep a piece of a companion you can’t replace. To grieving pet owners, that’s powerful. To ethicists, it’s problematic.
Dr. Katherine Roe of Cruelty Free International called cloning “a false promise that exploits grief.” Animal welfare groups warn that for every successful clone, dozens of embryos fail. The process often involves surrogate mothers that endure repeated pregnancies.
Brady hasn’t commented on those criticisms yet. But he did post on social media, “Junie has Lua’s soul — or maybe Lua has Junie’s. Either way, she’s home again.”
That line pretty much sums up the moral fog. For every person who sees scientific wonder, there’s another who sees hubris wrapped in sentimentality.
Tech Meets Mourning
There’s something deeply human about wanting to cheat death, even in small, furry ways. What’s new is that the tools now exist — and celebrities have both the money and the platform to make it mainstream.
Colossal has made headlines for using gene-editing tech to try to revive extinct species, pitching it as conservation through “de-extinction.” In that context, cloning a dog seems tame. But emotionally, it hits harder. A woolly mammoth doesn’t lick your face.
For Brady, this might not just be about grief; it’s about continuity. He’s a man who built an entire brand around control — of his body, his diet, his performance. In a sense, cloning his dog is just another expression of that mindset: refusing to accept loss as final.
Still, there’s something uneasy about it. Love, by definition, involves letting go. The cloned pet industry sells the opposite — the illusion that you can love without loss, that technology can flatten the ache. It’s comforting and uncanny at once.
The Cultural Mirror
Every generation gets the science it deserves. The Victorians had séances; we have pet cloning. Both grow out of the same ache — a refusal to believe that death is the end of connection.
What makes Brady’s story resonate isn’t the weirdness; it’s the relatability. Everyone who’s ever buried a pet knows that space. But most of us don’t have access to a company that also wants to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
If this sounds like a “Black Mirror” subplot, that’s because it is. In the episode Be Right Back, a grieving woman orders a digital version of her dead boyfriend built from his social data. It’s meant to soothe, but it ends up hollow. Cloning may be the biological version of the same impulse — a cure that can’t quite touch the wound.
The Question We’re Left With
So here’s the uncomfortable truth: Tom Brady didn’t do anything illegal. He didn’t even do anything particularly radical by modern standards. He just forced the rest of us to confront how technology keeps stretching the boundary between love and replication.
Will Junie behave like Lua? Maybe. Dogs learn from life, not just DNA. Will she feel the same to Brady? Almost certainly — grief is a generous illusion.
Brady says Lua’s clone “makes me feel like she never left.” Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps that’s the problem. Oh well, to each their own.