A laboratory in South Korea successfully cloned a dog for a couple from Yorkshire in the United Kingdom.
Laura Jacques and Richard Remde picked up two puppies cloned from the remains of their dead pet from the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation over the weekend. Jacques told The Guardian she raiser her dog, a boxer named Dylan, since he was a puppy.
"I mothered him so much, he was my baby, my child, my entire world," she said.
Sooam has cloned more than 700 dogs for paying customers, and each one costs about $100,000 (£67,000). Jacques and Remde were the first British customers of the laboratory. Their new puppies share Dylan's DNA, so they will look and act like Jacques' long-time companion.
"There are serious ethical and welfare concerns relating to the application of cloning technology to animals," the RSPCA said in a statement. "Cloning animals requires procedures that cause pain and distress, with extremely high failure and mortality rates. There is also a body of evidence that cloned animals frequently suffer physical ailments such as tumors, pneumonia and abnormal growth patterns."
Jacques and Remde will have to wait and see how their new puppies grow up, but Dylan had already died and would not have suffered from being cloned. However, Dylan was the first pet to be cloned after dying and Sooam has specific instructions for how to preserve a deceased pet's remains in order to be cloned.
David Kim, a scientist at Sooam, told The Telegraph he hopes Dylan's case will open doors for similar cloning cases in the future.
"This is the first case we have had where cells have been taken from a dead dog after a very long time," he said. "Hopefully it will allow us to extend the time after death that we can take cells for cloning."
