Music

Alberta dentist wants to clone John Lennon and raise him as his son

by Mark Teo

What would happen if John Lennon grew up in the Canadian prairies? It’s a question that Dr. Michael Zuk—a dentist who, when we last checked in with him, had obtained the Beatles singer’s tooth for $30,000—wants answered. We do, too.

Zuk, if you’ll recall, sent the tooth to a Pennsylvania lab with the hopes of extracting genetic information. What he planned to do with Lennon’s DNA, however, was less clear: Head on over to his website (johnlennontooth.com, natch) and he’s repping the tooth on the British TV show Never mind the Buzzcocks, talking about using the genetic information for Lennon-based paternity tests, and creating pendants, like the one at the top of this page, featuring his DNA.

Most interesting of all, though, are his plans to clone Lennon—something that, Zuk maintains, is an idea that could be worth millions to the right investor. But there’s more.

As Consequence of Sound notes, Zuk says that if cloned successfully, he’d raise a cloned Lennon as his own son—and, we assume, as a Canadian. In raising him as his own son—John Zuk-Lennon?—he’d provide the clone with guitar lessons and, he told a British news station, “hopefully keep him away from drugs and cigarettes, that kind of thing.”

On his website, Zuk predicts that we could see a clone by 2040, or Lennon’s 100th birthday. “If there is enough DNA to sequence it, it could be basically genetic real estate,” he says. “I think I can, because of the laws. Depends where you do these things.”

So, Alberta: Don’t let us down.