Andrew Follett
A British couple paid almost $100,000 to clone a pair of puppies from the DNA of their recently deceased boxer named Dylan.
“I’m trying to get my head round the fact that this puppy has 100% of the same DNA as Dylan,” the woman who ordered the cloned puppies told The Guardian. “I had Dylan since he was a puppy … I mothered him so much, he was my baby, my child, my entire world.”
This is the first British couple to clone a dog.The first puppy was born Dec. 26 while the second is due Tuesday. The puppies are named Chance and Shadow after characters in the movie “Homeward Bound.” Chance is shown in the Vine below.
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The South Korean laboratory which produced the cloned puppies has created more than 700 dogs for commercial customers.
One of the lab’s main researchers previously claimed in the prestigious journal Science they’d created the first cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them. However, this report was later discredited and the article was retracted. In 2009, the same researcher was convicted of embezzling research funding and illegally buying human stem cells for the research.
Reproductive cloning is a very inefficient and most cloned animal embryos do not develop into healthy individuals. The first cloned sheep, Dolly, was the only clone to be born alive out of 277 embryos. Side effects of the cloning process can cause an animal to be abnormally large at birth and often have defects in their liver, brain or heart. These side effects mean that cloned animals tend to age prematurely and have immune system issues.
Dylan, the dog which provided the DNA for the cloned puppies, is shown in the Tweet below.
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