|
Tails are wagging (on all five puppies) as stem cell scientists successfully clone "Booger", a pet Pit Bull Terrier.
Back in April 2008, Think Big Pets reported that a Californian woman, Bemann McKinney had paid $US150,000 to RNL Bio, a South Korean company using stem cell technology to clone her pet dog.
The puppies are now born and according to Anna Fifield of FT.com, "South Korean stem cell scientists have achieved a world first by giving a Californian woman not just one copy of her beloved dog, but five.
"Bemann McKinney was bereft when Booger died in 2006. The pit bull terrier was her companion and had helped her deal with a disability. She hardly dared dream of finding an exact replacement.
"I can't believe it - we've got five Boogers. I am so happy," Ms McKinney said.
"RNL Bio, a South Korean company, produced Boogers 2 to 6 to fulfil the world's first commercial order for a cloned dog. The five clones were born last week."
The Times of India reports, "The police and customs officials often rely on the expertise of trained dogs that are capable of sniffing out dope or detecting bombs and so help retrieving them before causing threat to human lives. Even more promising is the life-saving application of animal cloning in recreating animals that have the capability to detect diseases like cancer through their sophisticated sense of smell. Marine, a retriever in Japan, could sniff out the scent that cancer cells give off from a patient's breath or urine samples.
"Trained Labradors are known to have alerted patients an impending stroke."
Anna Fifield continues, "For the world of cloning the dogs are a bargain. RNL's rate for copying an animal is $150,000 but it charged Ms McKinney a third of that and gave her four dogs free because she agreed to allow the case to be publicised.
"We implanted 78 embryos into five surrogate mothers, and two became pregnant, one with four puppies and the other with one." Ra Jeong-chan, president of RNL Bio, told the Financial Times, 'From this we learnt that in the future we need to implant fewer embryos.'
"Booger once saved Ms McKinney's life by chasing off another dog that had attacked her, leaving her with serious wounds. She lost the use of her arms and Booger learnt to take over many of her daily tasks. These included taking off his owner's socks, opening the refrigerator door, taking laundry out of the washing machine and turning a key to open a door. There is no guarantee that the new Boogers will have the same personality traits, but Mr Ra said that such abilities were usually genetic and he was optimistic that the puppies would inherit their father's humanitarian ways.
"RNL and Ms McKinney, who is in Seoul to see the dogs, will discuss training some of the clones as service to help disabled or elderly people. To make the baby Boogers, RNL worked in conjunction with some of the scientists at Seoul National University who made the world's first cloned dog. Snuppy the Afghan hound was born in 2005...
"RNL and SNU hope to accept more commercial orders and could clone 100 "companion dogs" next year. But "service dogs" are their priority.
"RNL has cloned four black Labradors from a Japanese dog that can sniff cancer cells in humans and - for the South Korean customs service - it has produced six pups that can detect drugs."
Our pets show us unconditional love and the idea of recreating that pet love again and again is joyful. Cloning humans is another matter! Will pet cloning stop there?
|
