Get your dog clone for £50,000
We really are moving into the twilight world of science fiction horror here, where do we draw the line, each animal is unique and so are human. Cloning is not nature, and in the end nature will have its say. Can somebody explain to me what is the point of cloning these dogs, when there are so many unwanted dogs needing a home.
Mira, Chingu and Sarang are the world’s first commercially cloned dogs and Biotechnology firm BioArts, the company behind the cloning of these puppies will next month hold an online auction to give pet owners a chance to have their dogs cloned for $100,000 USD - about £50,000 GBP.
The three puppies - named Mira, Chingu and Sarang - were created from small pieces of skin and other body tissue taken from Missy, a collie husky cross which belonged to Mr Hawthorne’s mother.
Samples of Missy were taken in 1997 and after her death in 2002. They were cloned using the same technique developed by British scientists for Dolly the sheep.
The clones were created in a joint venture with the disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk.
He produced the world’s first cloned dog in 2005, but was forced to resign from Seoul University after it emerged that he had faked many other aspects of his research.
His team used single cells taken from Missy’s body and removed their nuclei, the blobs at the centre of cells which contain a complete set of DNA.
Each nucleus was injected into a hollowed-out egg cell taken from another dog and then fused with electricity. The cell began to divide and grow, just like a newly-conceived embryo.
After a few days, the scientists selected the healthiest embryos and implanted them into a donor female, which gave birth 60 days later. Each puppy is a genetic copy of Missy.
Although the puppies share the same genetic make-up as their ‘mother’, there is no guarantee that they will have the same personality.
Their fur coloring and size, which is influenced by conditions in the womb, are also unlikely to be identical.
A spokesman for BioArts said cloning had a 25 per cent efficiency rate, with one in four implanted embryos developing into a healthy pregnancy. Of the cloned puppies that were born, one in five didn’t survive to adulthood.
[via dailymail]
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6:59 pm on June 17th, 2008
To start, BioArts is auctioning off the cloning of 5 dearly loved dogs. Period. There is no reason to fabricate fear mongering around a process that is produces a single dog which is a genetic replica. These dogs are just as healthy as human babies produced via in vitro fertilization. To see just how healthy the dogs are check out the video clips on bestfriendsagain.com.
BioArts is a legitimate company which is offering a unique service to 5 customers. This addition to the dog population is negligible when you look at the grand scheme of things.