Seoul (AFP) – At $100,000 a head, the puppies frolicking around the fenced lawn in western Seoul don’t come cheap — but at least their owners know exactly what they are getting.<\/p>\n
The lawn belongs to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, a world leader in pet cloning that has run a thriving commercial business over the past decade catering to dog owners who want to live with their pets forever … literally.<\/p>\n
With a client list including princes, celebrities and billionaires, the foundation offers owners protection against loss and grief with a cloning service that promises the perfect replacement for a beloved pet.<\/p>\n
Since 2006, the facility has cloned nearly 800 dogs, commissioned by owners or state agencies seeking to replicate their best sniffer and rescue dogs.<\/p>\n
“These people have very a strong bond with their pets … and cloning provides a psychological alternative to the traditional method of just letting the pet go and keeping their memory,” said Wang Jae-Woong, a researcher and spokesman for Sooam.<\/p>\n
“With cloning, you have a chance to bring back the pets,” he said in the facility’s “care room” where each cloned puppy is kept in a glass-fronted, temperature-controlled pen and monitored by researchers around the clock.<\/p>\n
Ever since the milestone birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996, the rights and wrongs of cloning have been a topic of heated debate and Sooam Biotech has been regarded with particular suspicion because of its founder, Hwang Woo-Suk.<\/p>\n
In two articles published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005, Hwang claimed to have derived stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos, a world first.<\/p>\n
– Fraudulent hero –<\/p>\n
He was lauded as a national hero in South Korea before it emerged that his research was fraudulent and riddled with ethical lapses.<\/p>\n
Hwang was given a two-year suspended prison sentence in 2009, after being convicted of embezzlement and bioethical violations.<\/p>\n
Sooam Biotech clones many animals, including cattle and pigs for medical research and breed preservation, but is best known for its commercial dog service.<\/p>\n
The process involves harvesting a mature cell from the dog to be copied and transferring its DNA to a donor egg cell that has had its own genetic material removed.<\/p>\n
The cell and the egg are “fused” with an electrical jolt, and the resulting embryo is implanted in a surrogate mother dog, which will give birth about two months later.<\/p>\n
Despite the $100,000 price tag, requests for the service have poured in from around the world, Wang said — around half from North America.<\/p>\n
Some have sought clones of other pets like cats, snakes and even chinchillas, but Wang said the demand for such animals was too small to justify the cost.<\/p>\n
Walls around the five-storey Sooam Biotech centre are adorned with dozens of photos of cloned dogs and their smiling owners — tagged with their national flags including the US, Mexico, Dubai, Russia, Japan, China and Germany.<\/p>\n
“(The clients) understand that a clone is an identical twin of the original pet, but also has a lot of genetic predispositions and the potential to develop as the original pet,” Wang said.<\/p>\n
– 9\/11 canine hero –<\/p>\n
One well publicised cloning was of Trakr, a former police dog hailed as a hero after discovering the last survivor of the 9\/11 attack on the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
Sooam produced five clones after Trakr’s owner won a contest for the world’s most “clone-worthy” dog.<\/p>\n
High profile clients have included Princess Shaikha Latifah of Dubai who cloned her pet dog in 2015 and helped launch a joint research study into cloning camel breeds known for high milk production.<\/p>\n
For the most part, the foundation’s clients and financial supporters of Hwang Woo-Suk’s research prefer to remain anonymous.<\/p>\n
“Few of our backers — even the most loyal ones — want to voice their support publicly,” said Sooam Biotech’s general manager Kim Hoon, who acknowledged that the scandal involving the facility’s founder had tainted its image.<\/p>\n
“I think the only way to win the public’s trust back is making more genuine scientific breakthroughs,” he said.<\/p>\n
The centre does not conduct any human stem cell research after being repeatedly denied a state approval to do so.<\/p>\n
But it is pushing a number of ambitious projects, most notably an effort to clone an extinct mammoth.<\/p>\n
Since 2012, Hwang’s team has attempted to cultivate living cells from the frozen remains of mammoths in Siberia.<\/p>\n
– Disease ‘models’ –<\/p>\n
For medical research purposes, Sooam Biotech also produces genetically-engineered animals, or “disease models” that are predisposed to Alzheimer’s, diabetes or certain cancers.<\/p>\n
During a visit to the clinic by AFP, Hwang himself was leading a procedure to inject the embryo of a Beagle into a surrogate mother dog’s womb.<\/p>\n
“This dog, once born, has a possibility to become a disease model for human brain tumours,” Hwang said.<\/p>\n
Sooam is also involved in a joint venture with Chinese biotechnology firm Boyalife to set up what will be the world’s largest animal cloning factory in the northeastern Chinese port city of Tianjin.<\/p>\n
But head researcher Jeong Yeon-Woo said the dog cloning remained his favourite service because of the reaction of owners when they see the puppies.<\/p>\n
“They look like they found a child that had been missing,” Jeong said.<\/p>\n
“The moment of pure joy like that … makes me realise again why I’m doing this.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seoul (AFP) – At $100,000 a head, the puppies frolicking around the fenced lawn in western Seoul don’t come cheap — but at least their owners know exactly what they are getting. The lawn belongs to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, a world leader in pet cloning that has run a thriving commercial business over Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}