After the beloved family dog passes away, after the crying and the pet cemetery in the garden, after looking and sobbing at playtimes pictures hanging on the fridge, new puppy or kitten sooner or later follows its predecessor.
New pet, new smiles, new experiences.
But some people really cant cope with the loss. And here is where technology comes in: dog cloning. Yup: if you believe that Spot, Fifi or Runner were so special no other pet will ever be able to top them, you can actually take a sample of their DNA to a specialized clinic and take them back from dog heaven. Well, not really back, but a animal with the exact same DNA coding will be the exact copy of the mourned one. Also personality-wise? Apparently, but that’s still all to be figured out.
The story of Laneclot Encore is one good example of how far you can go for love.
Edgar and Nina Otto, a Florida couple, had their yellow Labrador retriever, Lancelot, cloned after he died of cancer.
The procedure costed the Otto family US$155,000 and raised lots of eyebrows among not only the general public but also the pet-caring community. “We have gotten some negative feedback from people on the price.” Yet, as Lancelot Encore squirmed in his arms, he added, “But we feel it is worth it.” Said Mr. Otto. Most of the negative comments regard the county’s critical economical situation opposed to getting a new pet for such an amount of money.
Dr. Sara Pizano’s opinion, of Miami-Dade County’s animal services department, focused also on the financial aspect but from another point of view. She said that for the price the Ottos paid for having Lancelot cloned, “we could do spays and neuters for six months.”
The company in charge of the procedure was the Northern California biotech firm BioArts International. BioArts partnered with Dr. Hwang S Woo-Suk, of the South Korea biotech research firm Sooam. An egg containing the late Lancelot’s DNA was placed in a Korean dog to create Lancelot Encore. Once the pup was able to leave his birth mother and go out on his own, he was flown from South Korea to San Francisco before finally making his way to Miami.
South Korea appears to be one of the world’s cloning center. Last August a Seoul-based biotechnology firm said it will open a dog cloning centre capable of cloning eventually up to 1,000 dogs annually early next year.
“We need this new facility to turn dog cloning services into a full-fledged business,” Cho Seong-Ryul, director of RNL Bio, told AFP.
