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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.

It took Christopher Columbus 36 days to reach America. Now you fly to New York in about 8 hours. The first commercial computer, the UNIVAC I costed about $1,550,000 and weighed 13 tons. How much did you spend for your laptop?

Tech devices have been getting smaller, faster and cheaper. We all noticed that. This development is becoming reality in the DNA research field as well, as Dr. Stephen Quake, a Stanford engineer, has recently proven the world.

He recently decoded is own genome sequence with less than $50,000 and just a three-member staff thanks to his Heliscope Single Molecule Sequencer. This innovative machine can sequence a human genome in four weeks with a small technical staff. Companies and labs who have been providing this service relied on hundreds of machines and large staff to get the job done. The most recently sequenced human genome before Dr. Quake’s costed about $250,000 to be decoded, and his machine brings the cost to less than a fifth of that. Not to mention that it is much faster. He said the much-discussed goal of the $1,000 genome could be attained in two or three years. That is the cost at which genome sequencing could start to become a standard part of medical practice. Once again, we are watching modern technology became obsolete live.

We are driving fast down the road of routine full genome sequencing. This will lead to a better understanding of our personal disease risk-factors and prevention.

“You have to have a strong stomach when you look at your own genome,” Dr. Quake said. Looking at his own, he discovered a variant associated with heard disease. Luckily he inherited only from one parent, which leaves him with another healthy gene copy.

The cost of the device is “about $1 million, depending on how hard you bargain,” Dr. Quake said. Funny enough it is about the same as the UNIVAC I. Will genome sequencing devices become part of household first-aid kits in a decade time?

The genome of the HIV virus, responsible for AIDS and AIDS-related infections, has been entirely decoded by a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina lead by professor Kevin Weeks. This is a huge step forward towards understanding how this deadly virus attacks the human body and, consequently, how it can be cured.

Prior to this scientific achievement retroviral drugs, the only known cure to HIV’s symptoms, not to the disease itself, where shaped to attack only few decoded parts of the virus’ genome. HIV, like many other viruses, is composed of a single stranded RNA, some sort of single-stranded DNA molecule. While DNA contains fixed and sequenced genetic information, the RNA is able to fold into complicated patterns. This makes the molecule much more difficult to analyze.

The next step in HIV RNA research will be to change its sequence in order to understand how this affects the virus and discover its weak sides.
“We are also beginning to understand tricks the genome uses to help the virus escape detection by the human host”, said Weeks.

This will help in starting antiretroviral treatment (ART) as early as possible in HIV positive people. A recent study conducted by professor Matthias Egger of the University of Berne in sub-Saharan Africa has shown that mortality rates of people starting HIV treatment are not much different than those of the general population if treatment is started before the immune system has been severely damaged.

According to the latest UNAIDS report on the global AIDS epidemic, released in July 2008, there have been significant gains in preventing new HIV infections worldwide, especially in heavily-plagued countries. But if HIV infections have globally dropped from 3 to 2.7 million, the rates of infections are rising in countries such as China, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
Some so-called first-world countries are experiencing a rise in infection as well, such as Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Japanese cloning experts were successful in cloning a mouse that has been dead for 15 years, and that the new animal turned out fine. It was even able to reproduce with another female rat, which gave researchers a field day, seeing how this step in science could bring forth a cloning “revolution.” The cell that the team used was stored for all these years in an environment with a constant temperature of about -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Because this temperature is almost identical to the one frozen ground has, cloning experts are confident that they can find a mammoth cell that was preserved since the last Ice Age. Such a huge breakthrough in the field of genetics has the international scientific community buzzing with excitement, as the new experiment proved that not only living animals can be cloned, but dead ones as well.

Current estimates place the potential number of dead mammoths under Siberian soil at about 10,000, so the odds of scientists finding a good cell are pretty good. The main problem for cloning the large beast is not a good cell though, but rather a host to plant the cell in. The mouse was “resurrected” when his cell was inserted into a female mouse and developed there.