It has been more than two decades since the world freaked over the cloning of Dolly- the Sheep, followed by Jurrasic Park, terrifying the audiences with the possibility of bringing back the gigantic carnivores. The topic, however, eventually petered out and became a distant possibility. Until now... The rapid pace of science and technology, the age of gene editing, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence finally made the sci-fi, futuristic scenario a reality. And no, its not about bringing back the T-rexes.
Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, performs numerous C-sections in his clinic and the newborn is given not a name, but a number — representing that its a clone. What’s interesting is that the baby isn’t a human.
It’s a puppy!!
Yes, dogs are being cloned at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, South Korea, the world’s first company dedicated to cloning the man’s best friend.
Cloning has always left ethicists more than apprehensive — it comes at the cost of pain and suffering. Besides requiring dozen or more embryos to produce a single healthy dog, the surrogate mothers may be treated with hormones and drugs, which in the long run, may lead to miscarriages, increased mortality or deformity of the pups. The first dog cloning, in 2005, took about 100 borrowed wombs and more than 1000 embryos! It was named Snuppy, amalgam of “Seoul National University” and “puppy”.
Today, the process- Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer- is very fine-tuned: thanks to years of trial and error. It all begins with poking a micro-hole in an egg from a donor dog and removing the nucleus (where DNA is housed). Next, the nucleus is replaced by a cell from the dog to be cloned (skin or cheek cell). Finally, this hybrid egg is blasted with short burst of electricity to fuse the cells and initiate cell division. The embryo is embedded in a surrogate’s womb and if everything goes well, a puppy is born some 60 days later!! Cloning pets is, “like The Handmaid’s Tale,” says one ethicist. “It’s a canine version of reproductive machines.”
All this fancy stuff makes one wonder, why would people want to clone their dogs?
The dogs considered to be family members and when they die, its hard for people who were really close to them. Cloning to these people is an alternative to a funeral, another way of dealing with death --- the closest thing to getting back to the lost dog. Having said that, though the clones look like the original dog, and share some traits, they don’t have the original dog’s memories. They are more like identical twins borns at a later date. A $100,000 twin out of time perhaps! Cloning has become a business indeed. If the dog owner provides DNA from a deceased pet quickly enough — within five days of its death — Sooam promises a speedy replacement. If the cells provided are not compromised, Sooam guarantees to give back a replica of the dog in 5 months! Expensively fascinating indeed...
Reference- http://www.vanityfair.com
